Page 82 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
“Want to tell us about it?” Richard asked. He grabbed three forks and the pie tin and motioned toward the dining table.
So Oliver did. Over very strong coffee and the rest of the pie, he told Ben and his dad everything—from the very first paper rose he saved in the street at the Greek restaurant to running into Chloe in New York, from the grumpy beginnings of their anonymous letter writing to the rooftop at the gala, culminating to now, with Jennifer gambling away Chloe’s money and Oliver’s certainty that Chloe was his pen pal on the other side of the mysterious, traveling paper roses.
Richard’s mouth hung open, a forkful of pie suspended in midair.
Ben whistled.
Oliver sighed. “I know.”
“I guess I was wrong about Mom,” Ben said. “I just… I really wanted Noah and Davy to get to know their grandma. But you were right. Mom’s not…” He shook his head. “Even if she’s trying to change, she’s not good for us. We need a clean break.”
Richard sighed but nodded.
“As for Chloe,” Ben said. “I don’t know what to say except wow. Just wow.”
Oliver sank his head into his hands. “I screwed everything up, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did,” Richard said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. Joneses aren’t quitters.”
He was right. Oliver needed to apologize. For this, for the gala rooftop, for hiding his identity, for refusing to talk about the past.
“I don’t trust myself to call her, though. The words will avalanche out of me and sound unhinged.”
“Write to her then,” Ben said. “It’s what you two have always done.”
A flame of hope flickered in Oliver’s chest. Writing.Yes. From the very start, that had been their way.
“What do I say, though? How do I even begin?”
Richard was quiet for a moment. Then he scooted away from the table. “Come with me. I have something I think you’ll want to have.”
Oliver pushed the wheelchair to his dad’s room, Ben following. When they got there, sadness knifed through Oliver as he took in all the orange pill bottles on the nightstand.
But Richard ignored them and rolled to his closet, pointing up to the back corner of the top shelf.
“I didn’t know if you’d ever want this again,” he said. “But I saved it just in case.”
Oliver reached up into the closet and came back with a dusty shoebox.
It was decorated in beads and sequins and a patchwork of mismatched wrapping paper scraps, and in the center of the lid in glitter glue was a single word in all caps: CLOVER.
“Oh my god.” Tiny ripples of electricity shivered over Oliver’s skin. “It’s the memory box that she made for me in high school. But how…?”
The box was one of two (Chloe had made a matching one for herself), and it contained mementos of their history—pebbles they’d found and painted one summer at Lake of the Ozarks, a mini notebook that documented all of the Ice Creamery flavors they had come up with together, Chloe’s class pictures in every grade from first grade and up. The memory box was one of the “essentials” that Oliver had packed when the family fled Kansas.
But almost a year later, Oliver had purposely left it behind at a homeless shelter. It had been months and months since he’d spoken to Chloe, and continuing to carry around their memories made losing her even harder to bear.
“Ben saw you walk away from the box that day,” Richard said. “I knew that you needed to do it, then. But I thought there might come a day in the future when—with enough distance—the hurt would have healed enough that you might want this again. So I kept it and hid it, for when that day came.”
“Oh, Dad.” Oliver wanted to say something more, but an iron band had clamped itself around his throat.
“Take it with you,” Richard said. “Maybe the answer to what you’re looking for is inside.”
Oliver gave him a tight hug. “Thank you,” he said. “Both of you.”
In the guest room alone, Oliver opened the box and set each item individually on the bed. There was a crooked candle they’d made on a trip to Lecompton’s Bald Eagle Rendezvous, a historical re-creation event. A mini Slinky Chloe had won for him in one of those carnival booths where the odds were so bad, you weren’t ever supposed to walk away with a prize. Ticket stubs from when the Vans Warped Tour came through Kansas City.
He touched each item reverently, reliving the stories behind them. As implausible as the paper rose correspondence was, it didn’t seemasimprobable when he sifted through all of his and Chloe’s history.
