Page 26 of The Party Line

Chapter Nine

How long are you going to ignore all that mail?Aunt Gracie’s voice was loud and clear in my head that afternoon when I walked past the stacks of unopened envelopes and magazines piled up on the credenza. I had put off opening the mail for weeks. By just scanning through the messy piles, I could tell that a lot of it involved sympathy cards, and reading through them would make her passing so final. If I didn’t read them, then I could pretend she was out visiting Jasper and would be coming through the back door at any time.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I muttered as I shot the mail a dirty look and went on into the kitchen.

The leftover muffins from that morning were my lunch, along with a banana and a tall glass of sweet tea. Mama would fuss at me for not eating my vegetables, but one day a week with no green beans or broccoli wouldn’t hurt me. When I had finished eating, I headed through the foyer and set my foot on the first step going upstairs. Refusing to even glance at the stacks of mail, I said, “Today, I’m going to clean some more in Aunt Gracie’s room.”

A piece of mail fluttered through the air and landed at my feet. “Okay, okay, I get the message,” I declared with a long sigh. “I’ll clean off the credenza before I go upstairs, but understand that I’m doing this against my will.”

My bare feet made slapping sounds against the hardwood floors as I marched to the utility room, dumped the laundry basket full of towelsthat needed to be folded on top of the washing machine, and carried it back to the foyer. I brushed all the mail into the basket and sat down on the floor to go through it piece by piece.

“I will not ...” The words were barely out of my mouth when I remembered having to writeI will not chew gum in Mrs. Hudson’s class againfifty times. “I will not toss the mail on the credenza and wait so long to go through it again,” I said aloud. “If I do, I will have to write sentences.”

Envelopes that were clearly junk mail were tossed across the foyer toward the door; I would bring a trash bag in later and gather them all up. Then I began to sort through those that looked like they held greeting cards; they went to my right. The others that had a business-return label went to the left. All kinds of companies packaged their promotional materials that way just to throw a person off, so I wasn’t expecting much. I would give them a fighting chance, but most likely they would wind up in the pile to be trashed.

My hands trembled when I picked up that first card, but I was determined to bite the bullet, so to speak. I opened it to find a sympathy card with a field of Texas bluebonnets on the front. I glanced up at a small picture sitting on the credenza—Mama and me before I was even walking—in a field of blue flowers. Inside the card was a nice little greeting, but it was the note on the side that brought tears in my eyes.

I don’t know who will be reading this, but I’m so sorry for y’all’s loss. Miz Gracie saved me. I came from a big family, and my folks thought only the boys should have an education. Girls didn’t matter so much, since all they would be doing was keeping house and rocking cradles. I was about to quit school after the eighth grade, but Miz Gracie gave me a part-time job in her store—taught me all about how to be a modern young lady. Then she gave me the money to go to college. I am now a retired schoolteacher,and I owe it all to Grace Evans. I just wanted whoever is reading this to know how much good she did.

By the time I reached the sixth card, the dam holding back tears let loose. By the tenth one, I was really sobbing. Aunt Gracie had touched so many people’s lives, yet she’d never bragged about her generosity. She used to tell me that crying was good for the soul. If that was the truth, then my heart shouldn’t even have a speck of dust on it.

I didn’t want to read anymore, but staring at the stack of unopened ones was like passing a car wreck on the side of the road. I couldn’t look away from the accident any more than I could throw all the rest of the cards into the trash can without opening them.

“Lila, where are you?” Mama’s voice sounded like it was a mile away.

I rubbed my face on a corner of my shirt, but another batch of tears started up as soon as I did.

“Delilah Grace, are you home?” Her tone was somewhere between angry and worried. “I’ve called you a dozen times, and it’s going straight to voicemail.”

I reached for my phone, but it wasn’t in my hip pocket.

“In the foyer,” I called out between sobs.

Something rattled on the cabinet, and then I heard Mama running across the kitchen and into the foyer. She sat down beside me and wrapped me up in her arms, patting my back the whole time. “What’s the matter?”

I pointed at the sympathy cards strewn all around me. “Those happened.”

Mama dried my tears on a tissue she pulled from her purse. “I should have been here with you when you tackled this job.”

“Almost every one of them has a story to tell about how Aunt Gracie helped them,” I said between hiccups. “And there’s at least fifty more of them that need to be opened.”

“She believed in women empowering women,” Mama said, her voice cracking. She took a deep breath and went on. “Long before the concept was even a popular thing. I’ll help you go through the rest. You should have called me before you even started. What do you think we should do with them?”

“I’ll put them in a box with other things like her diary and store it up in the attic. Maybe someday I’ll get rid of them, but not for a while.” I opened another one, and the greeting alone brought on a fresh river of tears, and the little note—from someone named Martha—was so sweet that I wished Aunt Gracie could read it for herself.

Then, in a split second, anger replaced the tears. “Why do people wait until someone is gone to tell the survivors how much that person meant to them?” I asked through clenched teeth. “These people should have written letters to Aunt Gracie while she was alive, not to us after she is gone.”

“Maybe that should be a lesson to us,” Mama said. “I’m pretty sure theywouldhave written thank-you notes to her through the years. You might even find some tucked away in the attic. She never was one to throw anything out.”

I put the card back in the envelope and gently laid it with the others. “Someday, when and if I ever have children, they can learn just how great Aunt Gracie was by reading all these notes. Why didn’t she ever get married and have children?”

Mama took another tissue from her purse and handed me a fresh one. “I asked her that many years ago. She said even though we had only a slight connection through her mother, birth and blood didn’t always make a family. She also told me that Jasper was as much her brother as real kinship could have ever made him, and that she had me for a daughter and you for a granddaughter. Do you know what she would tell us right now?”

I dried my eyes and took a deep breath. “To pull ourselves up by the bootstraps?”

“Something like that,” Mama answered. “She would say that she raised us both to be strong, and that we need to stop weeping and wailing and get on with life.”

“‘Life is short, at best,’” I said, quoting something she’d said many times, “‘so don’t waste a single second of it.’”

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