Richard loved to surprise her, she was learning to accept his kindnesses and trust that some men really were open and giving just because that’s who they were—that flowers weren’t always purchased after a fight. She fingered a calla lily cup, held her hair back and bent down to breathe in the pink peonies, felt a tear of gratitude slide down her face.
They’d gone to the Sunday market, her looking for some rhubarb and strawberries to make one of her famous pies, when the flower seller had tried to entice her. She’d hesitated while visually taking in the bounteous bunches of colored blossoms, but had decided not to spend the twenty-five on herself this week.
She and Richard had walked the slopes together with only fruits and vegetables in hand, but he must have quickly driven back down the hill to buy her the bouquet after she’d hugged him goodbye and gone upstairs to slip off her sandals and use the bathroom. Couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes, but in that short time, Richard had somehow gone back down and gotten the flowers and here they were beaming on the kitchen table! He’d torn a corner off her shopping list, drawn a heart and XO.
After her first two marriages, she’d started taking up a lot of bad habits including smoking cigarettes on her back porch, inhaling as she watched and talked to the bird's who had made their homes in the bamboo. Recently, she’d had to tell seven different hospital aids, nurses and the surgeon, before going in for her ear operation, that she smoked only 2-3 cigarettes a day. She was told repeatedly it was important information before being anesthetized. She felt they’d kept asking because none of them really believed her. At her most recent check-up the doc had read her records asking her how long she’d been smoking a half-pack a day. “That’s ten cigarettes a day,” she threw up her hands!
Why she smoked was difficult to answer, of course she knew it wasn’t healthy, stinks, made her breath bad, but there was some instant relief she’d felt since her early teens. There were many years she’d stop smoking and life would go on normally, but when extreme stress came her way, like her last boyfriend telling her that he’d made-out with a woman she’d mistook as a bag-lady, just because he wanted to, and that he was no longer going to be in her life, she’d immediately felt the craving.
Like smoke would put out the fire burning inside of her, or dry out the wave of water coming her way. She tried talking herself down, ‘you’ve made it all these years, are you sure you want to start that up again?’ but seemed unable to listen to herself when she automatically pulled into the small ‘76 station the Chinook Indians run, bought a pack of American Spirits, the organic kind, like it mattered, and driven the five mile Megler Bridge to the Washington side. She pulled the plastic thread, tugged at the white foil and lit up at Dismal Nitch, smoke filling her lungs, tears streaming down her face.
That afternoon, she’d been surprised to open the mailbox and find amongst her gas bill and grocer ads, a manila envelope with several foreign stamps in the right corner, addressed to her. She sat on her front porch, threw the others to the side and opened the larger to find an old letter from Amsterdam--simply wrapped in a new piece of crisp, white paper, her name and address scrawled in black ink on the fresh, with no further explanation. She carefully opened the thin and yellowing envelope and began to read the careful in cursive writing of years gone by, dated December 1969. She smelled the page which seemed to hold in its folds the diked, sea-air of somewhere both familiar and far away.
Dear Anna, when this letter makes it into your hands I will be dead and you will have lived half of your life. It is of great importance that you know, and then the words were smeared together, blending under the rain of someone else’s weeping? The star-shaped, dried drops, both telling, and hiding all.