The Letter in the Bedside Drawer
For twelve years, there was an envelope in my bedside drawer that I never opened.
It sat under a Bible, a tube of hand cream, my reading glasses, and a little stack of birthday cards from my grandchildren. A plain white envelope, sealed, with one word written across the front in my husband’s slanted handwriting.
Margaret.
Some nights, I took it out and held it. I turned it over. I ran my thumb along the flap.
Then I put it back.
Robert gave it to me three days before he died. He was in a bed at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, with tubes in his arms and his skin the color of old paper. He pressed it into my hand and held my fingers closed around it.
“Promise me something, Maggie.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t open this unless something happens that you can’t explain.”
“What kind of something?”
He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were wet.
“You’ll know,” he said.
I promised.
And for twelve years, nothing happened that I couldn’t explain. My husband died. My children grew older. My grandchildren had children of their own. The maple tree in the backyard got taller, and my knees got worse, and the house got quieter.
Then, at eighty years old, my body started changing in a way I couldn’t explain.
And I finally understood what Robert meant.
My name is Margaret Whitmore. I’m eighty years old.
I’ve raised three children, welcomed seven grandchildren, and watched four great-grandchildren become part of our family. I was married to Robert Whitmore for fifty years. He sold life insurance for Charter Oak Mutual in Hartford for thirty-eight of them. He wore the same brown suit to work for a decade. He clipped coupons. He drove a Buick until it had two hundred and eleven thousand miles on it.
He was the most ordinary, dependable man I ever knew.
That’s what I believed, anyway.
After living through so much, I thought there was very little left that could surprise me.
I was wrong.
It started six months ago, in the spring.
At first, my waistline seemed a little bigger than usual. I noticed it when I was getting dressed for church. My navy skirt pulled a little at the button.
I assumed it was ordinary weight gain. I’d been eating too many of the lemon cookies my neighbor, Dottie, brings over on Thursdays. At my age, everything settles somewhere.
Then my favorite gray trousers stopped fitting.
By June, I couldn’t close the zipper on any pants I owned. I switched to loose cotton dresses, the kind with no waist at all. I told myself it was because of the summer heat.
By August, my stomach was round and hard and swollen, like a woman five months along. Bending down to tie my shoes made me short of breath. Sitting in Robert’s old recliner felt like sitting with a bag of groceries in my lap.
I tried not to think about it.
When you’re eighty, you learn that if you go looking for problems in your body, you’ll always find some. So I stopped looking. I wore my loose dresses and ate less and told myself it would go away on its own.
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