I pack the letter beside a broken latch
so the wind won’t have it
before I reach the house.
Jo died last November.
Today I mean to leave the letter
on our old kitchen table,
if the table is still there.
Jo always meant to fix that latch.
I always meant to tell her
why I wanted her to stay.
I live in town now,
in a house small enough to warm.
This morning the road is dry,
and my daughter will meet me
where the old gate leans toward the grass.
Elsie wants the saddle.
I promised it last winter,
then found a reason to keep it
through spring.
Under my horse,
the road sounds like the kitchen floor
when Jo walked in with rain on her boots.
She never wiped them long enough.
There was always something else
she needed to tell me.
Once it was a house in town,
a little rented place near the clinic,
with a pump that wouldn’t freeze.
She’d circled it in the newspaper
and left the paper by my plate.
I put the salt on top of it.
We had fences to mend.
We had animals who knew our voices.
We had always lived here,
which seemed, then,
like an answer.
The house is empty now.
One window still holds its glass.
In it, my hat goes dark
against the hills.
Elsie arrives in a wagon
with room for a saddle
and little room for anything else.
Two boxes, a lamp,
a blue basin full of folded clothes.
“You’re going,” I say.
“I told you in August.”
I heard town.
I heard a job and a smaller house.
I didn’t hear the wheels
until I saw them under her.
She helps me down.
Her hand stays under my elbow
a moment longer than I want.
I take the letter from the saddlebag.
The broken latch falls out beside it.
“What did you bring that for?”
I don’t know.
It had weight.
It kept something in place.
The letter has three pages.
The first is loose,
the other two folded together.
I lay them on the porch rail
while I lift the latch.
A gust takes the first page.
The wind takes what we haven’t held down.
I run three steps,
then have to stop.
Elsie goes after it,
catching the paper against the fence
before it can tear on a nail.
She reads the name at the top.
Nothing else.
“Can I?” she asks.
I reach for it.
She hands it back.
Jo,
I read aloud,
I thought if we stayed,
nothing important would change.
The letter shakes.
I press it against the porch post.
When you asked about the house in town,
I made it sound as though leaving
would mean you didn’t love our life.
I knew that wasn’t what you meant.
I was afraid you’d go,
and find you didn’t need me there.
Elsie sits on the lowest step.
“You told me she wanted to stay.”
“I told you what I wanted.”
A horsefly circles the saddle.
My mare flicks one ear.
We stand in the same ordinary afternoon
in which I have finally said it.
“Would she have got better in town?”
Elsie asks.
“I don’t know.”
I had imagined this question.
I had written several answers
on pages I threw away.
They were all longer than that.
Elsie looks toward her wagon.
“I’m not staying, either.”
I could tell her about the fence.
The pump.
The animals who know our voices.
Instead I loosen the saddle straps.
She holds the stirrup out of the dust
while I lift the saddle down.
It’s heavier than it used to be,
and, for a moment,
we both have it.
Then she takes the weight.
She lays it across a box in the wagon.
The worn seat faces the sky.
Jo repaired that seam
with yellow thread
because yellow was what she had.
I show Elsie the stitches.
She touches them once.
“That’s what I want to hear,” she says.
She bends closer to the yellow thread.
Elsie helps me mount from the porch step.
The mare stands quiet,
waiting as she always has.
We take the road back to town.
From the wagon bench,
Elsie leads my mare beside her own horse.
I ride without the saddle,
feeling each slow step.
I hold the folded letter
in one hand,
the horse’s mane in the other.
At my little house in town,
a little rain begins.
One drop lands on Jo’s name
and makes the J run down the page.
Elsie carries the saddle into my dry porch
for the night.
Tomorrow it will go back into her wagon.
I put the broken latch on my table.
I set the letter beside it,
where the salt used to stand.
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