An Unwilling Emissary
by Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh
Northeast Ohio Writer
I unearthed the letters from a small cardboard box.
Not the same carton where I found the macaroni necklace or the coroner’s note from my grandfather’s suicide. Nor the box where I found the vibrator, a dusty, purple, gelatinous appendage that elicited my silent admiration and shame, and which had been stored with a dog-eared Kama Sutra that at least one of my parents appeared to have studied in earnest.
The plain brown envelopes were addressed to my mother at her workplace, in care of her supervisor, his name listed matter-of-factly at an Akron-area high school on Route 8.
I opened the top letter.
“My dearest darling,” it began in a tall, loping script. The handwriting was unlike my father’s, but I imagined time could change penmanship the way chemo and Parkinson’s and old age had diminished his once strong, gripping hands.
The author went on to detail longings, wistfulness, that same tight-chested fire that I, too, had experienced, when lust was a drug I swallowed with breakfast, souring my stomach and fortifying my resolve.
This stranger’s mouth yearned for my mother, to hold and caress her various parts. In his arms she was made kittenish and new.
A faded postmark betrayed no date, though the brittle and dusty paper was from a bygone era, for sure.
From oft-repeated family lore, I knew my parents had met at a church mixer at fifteen and married in that same place of worship when they were twenty-two. There’d been sneaky dates and stolen proms, a first duplex apartment, and a weekend honeymoon in West Palm Beach, where my father’s naïve sunburn all but spoiled the purpose of the trip. But those stories had never mentioned a breakup or world enough or time for any lover on the side.
My mother had secreted this letter and its mates in the table beside the mattress she shared with my dying father. I resented this perfidy. She’d always played fast and loose with other people’s hearts. I’d never known she’d played even looser with her own.
I wanted to set them ablaze, these missives of feeling from a man who wasn’t my dad but perhaps might have been.
I considered harboring them, fodder for my moldering novel which was missing its spark and muse.
Or maybe I’d hide them beside my own marital bed, and summon tender sweetness never intended for me.
Instead, I slid the whole stack into a plastic bag and delivered the correspondence to my mother last week.
She resides in a facility now, tucked in with widows and widowers, broken shadows of the welders, farmers, and dreamers they know they once were. We drink tea together on Tuesdays, share long-winded stories, blueberry muffins, and regret.
I won’t lie. When I set those letters on my mother’s chair, I hoped she’d feel ashamed. Embarrassed to know her daughter had discovered the liaison. Perhaps she’d weep or mutter some thin-lipped excuse. Instead, she offered only this: “I was truly adored by two men, and they loved me both at once.”
We have funny notions of fecklessness and faith, as though it’s always a straight line separating one from the other. But that’s not how it happens most times. I adore my friends, my children, my partner, but I do not only love in a serial line. Hearts wander whether we will them to or not.
I considered my mother’s frailty, the way she leans on her walker to avoid pain in one knee, how her hair no longer covers a small patch of scalp, and her annoying habit of dropping napkins on the floor that she cannot pick up. Where is the young woman I loved to hate? Who is this creature, this curmudgeon, this crank?
I left her clutching the tattered remnants of the dead man who’d gotten away. Not my father, but the other one. Maybe their ghosts are still out there somewhere, both these men, apparitions, still playing tug-of-war for her now-broken heart.
Not the same carton where I found the macaroni necklace or the coroner’s note from my grandfather’s suicide. Nor the box where I found the vibrator, a dusty, purple, gelatinous appendage that elicited my silent admiration and shame, and which had been stored with a dog-eared Kama Sutra that at least one of my parents appeared to have studied in earnest.
The plain brown envelopes were addressed to my mother at her workplace, in care of her supervisor, his name listed matter-of-factly at an Akron-area high school on Route 8.
I opened the top letter.
“My dearest darling,” it began in a tall, loping script. The handwriting was unlike my father’s, but I imagined time could change penmanship the way chemo and Parkinson’s and old age had diminished his once strong, gripping hands.
The author went on to detail longings, wistfulness, that same tight-chested fire that I, too, had experienced, when lust was a drug I swallowed with breakfast, souring my stomach and fortifying my resolve.
This stranger’s mouth yearned for my mother, to hold and caress her various parts. In his arms she was made kittenish and new.
A faded postmark betrayed no date, though the brittle and dusty paper was from a bygone era, for sure.
From oft-repeated family lore, I knew my parents had met at a church mixer at fifteen and married in that same place of worship when they were twenty-two. There’d been sneaky dates and stolen proms, a first duplex apartment, and a weekend honeymoon in West Palm Beach, where my father’s naïve sunburn all but spoiled the purpose of the trip. But those stories had never mentioned a breakup or world enough or time for any lover on the side.
My mother had secreted this letter and its mates in the table beside the mattress she shared with my dying father. I resented this perfidy. She’d always played fast and loose with other people’s hearts. I’d never known she’d played even looser with her own.
I wanted to set them ablaze, these missives of feeling from a man who wasn’t my dad but perhaps might have been.
I considered harboring them, fodder for my moldering novel which was missing its spark and muse.
Or maybe I’d hide them beside my own marital bed, and summon tender sweetness never intended for me.
Instead, I slid the whole stack into a plastic bag and delivered the correspondence to my mother last week.
She resides in a facility now, tucked in with widows and widowers, broken shadows of the welders, farmers, and dreamers they know they once were. We drink tea together on Tuesdays, share long-winded stories, blueberry muffins, and regret.
I won’t lie. When I set those letters on my mother’s chair, I hoped she’d feel ashamed. Embarrassed to know her daughter had discovered the liaison. Perhaps she’d weep or mutter some thin-lipped excuse. Instead, she offered only this: “I was truly adored by two men, and they loved me both at once.”
We have funny notions of fecklessness and faith, as though it’s always a straight line separating one from the other. But that’s not how it happens most times. I adore my friends, my children, my partner, but I do not only love in a serial line. Hearts wander whether we will them to or not.
I considered my mother’s frailty, the way she leans on her walker to avoid pain in one knee, how her hair no longer covers a small patch of scalp, and her annoying habit of dropping napkins on the floor that she cannot pick up. Where is the young woman I loved to hate? Who is this creature, this curmudgeon, this crank?
I left her clutching the tattered remnants of the dead man who’d gotten away. Not my father, but the other one. Maybe their ghosts are still out there somewhere, both these men, apparitions, still playing tug-of-war for her now-broken heart.
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Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh is the author of Here Be Dragons: A Parent’s Guide, a memoir about the sweet and wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She is also the host of Wild Precious Life, a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have. Her writing has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, Today Parenting, and in the New York Observer. Annmarie lives in Cleveland, Ohio where she is querying a novel about all the beautiful truth in the lies we tell.
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