PART 1
Diane and I roomed together at East Tennessee State from 1969 to 1972. We lived on the third floor of Carter Hall, where the radiator hissed all winter and the streetlights outside made gold lines across our twin chenille bedspreads. We shared winter coats, three-ring binders, and fifty-cent grilled cheese sandwiches from the student grill. When she cried about her mother’s illness in November of our sophomore year, I sat on the floor with her until the room went gray with morning.
No fight ended our friendship. There was no big falling out, no harsh word, no betrayal over a boy. We simply graduated, took the jobs we could get, got married, and moved into the separate gears of adult life. For two or three years, we mailed Christmas cards with long updates scrawled inside. Then the notes became short. Then they became signatures. By 1980, the letters had stopped completely.
Life simply took over, the way it does when you are raising children and working forty hours a week and trying to keep an old house upright.
For forty-two years, my Friday routine has not changed. Every Friday at noon, I eat at the Cracker Barrel on Route 11. My late husband, Harold, used to meet me there when he was still working at the hardware supply. After he passed seven years ago, I kept going. It was familiar, it smelled like warm biscuits and cedar logs, and Jeannie had been my waitress at the same corner booth for eight years. She never even brought me a menu anymore. She just brought unsweetened iced tea with two lemon slices and chicken and dumplings.
Last Friday was cold and clear. I took my coat off, sat in my usual booth by the wall, and set my purse on the vinyl seat.
Jeannie walked over, set down my hot coffee, and pulled a folded white paper napkin from her apron pocket.
“The woman in booth six asked me to give you this,” Jeannie said, keeping her voice low.
I took the napkin. It was folded in half, creased firmly along the middle. Inside, written in blue ballpoint ink, was my full maiden name, followed by a question: “Are you still reading Willa Cather, or did you finally give up on Jim Burden?”
My throat closed up. The slant of the letters, the tall capital letters with the sharp loops, was handwriting I had not seen since June of 1972. But I recognized it like a church hymn I had sung every Sunday of my childhood.
I looked up at Jeannie. “Who gave this to you?”
“The woman over in booth six,” Jeannie whispered, nodding toward the middle row.
“She’s been coming in every Friday for about three years now. Always sits in six. Usually comes in about ten minutes after you do. She’s ten feet from where you’re sitting right now.”
Three years. Every single week, ten feet away from my shoulder.
I slid out of my booth. My knees felt stiff, and my hands were unsteady as I dropped the napkin on the table. I walked down the narrow carpeted aisle between the tables. Booth six was facing the fireplace. All I could see was the back of a woman’s head, silver hair cut neat and short, wearing a dark blue woolen cardigan.
I stopped at the edge of the wood partition. “Diane?”
The woman turned around, and when she did, she was holding a cracked leather address book with my name taped to the spine.
PART 2
She looked up at me, and fifty-two years seemed to hang between the two of us like smoke in a kitchen.
Her face had the lines of seven decades, her jaw was softer, and her hands were spotted with age, but her eyes were the exact same pale gray-green they were when we studied history notes until two in the morning.
“Martha,” she said. Her voice was lower than I remembered, raspy from years, but the cadence was Diane. “I told myself today I was either going to send that napkin over or stop coming on Fridays.”
“Three years?” I asked, gripping the varnished corner of the booth. “Jeannie said you’ve been sitting here for three years.”
Diane looked down at the table. On the wooden surface sat a plate of fried catfish, untouched, and that old address book with the cloth tape peeling along the edges. “Sit down for a minute, Martha. Please.”
I slipped into the booth across from her.
My heart was knocking against my ribs like a fist against a locked door. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you just walk over to my table the first week you saw me?”
“Because I didn’t think I had the right,” Diane said. She rested her fingers on the spine of the book. “And because I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed of what? We never fought. We just got busy. We drifted apart.”
“You drifted,” Diane said quietly, looking directly into my eyes. “I ran away.”
I stared at her, not understanding. In the spring of 1972, three weeks before commencement, Diane had suddenly stopped coming back to our dorm room before midnight. She had looked pale, lost ten pounds, and barely spoke to me during finals week. At the time, I assumed it was the strain of graduation and her impending wedding to David Miller, a boy from Kingsport she had been dating since our freshman year.
They had married two months after we walked across the stage, and by late summer, she had moved two states away.
“What are you talking about, Diane?”
“David wasn’t who you thought he was,” she whispered. Her fingers tightened on the old notebook. “And you tried to warn me. Do you remember what you told me on the porch of the student union that April?”
The memory was foggy at first, like looking through an old windowpane, but then it cleared. In April of 1972, David had come to pick her up in his father’s truck. He had been short-tempered, gripping her upper arm hard enough to leave red marks through her cardigan, snapping at her because she was five minutes late with her purse.
I had pulled Diane aside afterward and told her that a man who handles a woman like that before the wedding will handle her worse after it.
She had pulled away from me that afternoon. She had told me I was jealous because she was getting married first.
“You told me the truth,” Diane said, her voice shaking slightly. “And I chose pride. I married him anyway because the invitations were out, my parents had paid for the church, and I was too terrified to admit I had made a terrible mistake. And from that day on, every time I looked at your letters, all I saw was a mirror showing me what a coward I was.”
PART 3
The restaurant around us hummed with the sound of clattering forks and country music over the ceiling speakers, but at booth six, the room felt completely still.
“He forbade me from writing to you,” Diane said.
“By the second year we were married, he was checking the mail before I got home from the school where I taught. He found one of your long letters from 1974. You had written about Harold, and how happy you were in the little house on Sycamore. David tore it in half right in front of the sink, threw it in the trash, and told me that college was over, and my friends were a distraction.”
I felt a cold tightness settle in my chest. “Diane…”
“I let him do it,” she said, looking down at her hands. “That was the part that ate at me for thirty years. I didn’t stand up to him. I stopped writing back because it was easier than fighting him. When you stopped writing, I told myself it was for the best.
But the truth was, I felt so small, and so dirty for letting him control me, that I couldn’t bear to let you see what my life had become.”
“Where is David now?” I asked.
“He died seven years ago,” she said flatly. “In a nursing facility over in Bristol. We had thirty-eight years of marriage, Martha, and about four of them were decent. When he was gone, my daughter moved me here to Route 11, three miles from this restaurant, so I’d be close to the grandchildren.”
She pushed the cracked address book across the table toward me.
“Open it,” she said.
I pulled the notebook toward me. The leather was dry and split at the corners. Inside the front cover, tucked into the pocket, were four folded sheets of paper. They were yellowed at the folds, the ink slightly faded.
They were my letters.
The ones she had scrawled quick replies to, and the ones she had never answered. She had kept them hidden for half a century.
“When I walked in here three years ago and saw you in that booth,” Diane said, tears finally welling in the corners of her eyes, “I nearly walked right back out the front door. I thought, look at her. Martha lived the life she was supposed to live. She stayed strong, she had a good man, and she kept her dignity. I felt like that twenty-one-year-old girl on the union porch all over again, stubborn and stupid and ruined. I couldn’t bring myself to cross that ten feet of floor.”
“So why today?” I asked.
“Because last week, Jeannie brought you your coffee, and you had Harold’s wedding band on a gold chain around your neck,” Diane said softly.
“I saw you touch it when you sat down. And I realized you were lonely too. And I was letting an old ghost keep me from the only sister I ever had.”
ENDING
I didn’t answer her with a speech. I didn’t tell her it didn’t matter, because forty years of fear and silence do matter. But I reached across the table, took her hand in both of mine, and squeezed it until my knuckles showed white. Her hand was cold, but she squeezed back immediately, the way she used to grab my wrist when we were walking back to Carter Hall against the winter wind.
“Jeannie,” I called out, raising one hand.
Jeannie was standing at the register, watching us with a towel folded over her forearm. She hurried over, her eyes darting between our faces. “Everything okay, Martha?”
“Bring my chicken and dumplings over here to booth six,” I told her.
“And bring another order of hot biscuits.”
Jeannie looked at Diane, then looked at me, and a slow, warm smile spread across her face. “Coming right up.”
I slid the old address book into my purse, right next to my wallet. We sat there in booth six until two in the afternoon, long after the lunch rush had cleared out and the busboys had wiped down every table in the dining room. We didn’t try to fix the fifty years we lost. You can’t patch five decades of life over a basket of cornbread. But we talked about the radiator in Carter Hall, and we talked about her grandchildren, and we talked about the gardens we were going to plant when the ground thawed out in April.
When we finally stood up to leave, the cold November wind hit us at the front door. Diane pulled her blue woolen cardigan tight around her shoulders, and for the first time in three years, she didn’t walk out to the parking lot alone.
“Same time next week?” she asked, leaning against the wooden railing by the porch.
“Same time,” I said. “Booth six.”
