Louise

Chapter 1: The Kitchen Table

The pen was a Waterman, burgundy with a gold clip, and it had belonged to June. Robert Olmstead held it the way he held most things now—carefully, as though the world had become a place of thin glass and uncertain edges. He uncapped it, set the nib against a sheet of lined paper, and wrote the date: October 14, 2023.

Dear Louise,

He paused. The kitchen was quiet save for the ticking of the clock above the stove, a sound so constant across the decades that it had become indistinguishable from silence itself. The light over the table cast a warm circle on the paper, on his weathered hands, on the coffee mug he'd forgotten to drink from.

He did not know exactly what he wanted to say. That was not new. He had not known what to say for eighteen years—not when she left, not when the phone calls dwindled from rare to nonexistent, not when the Christmas cards stopped and the silence between them hardened into something that felt permanent, geological. But now there was a pressure behind his sternum that was not grief exactly, though it lived in the same neighborhood. It was urgency. The doctor in Cedar Rapids had used words like "early stage" and "manageable" and "planning ahead," and Robert had sat in the vinyl chair across from Dr. Paulson and nodded as though these were reasonable things to discuss over fluorescent lighting, as though a man could plan for the slow subtraction of himself.

So he wrote.

I don't suppose you want to hear from me. I've thought about that, and I've decided it doesn't matter much whether you want to or not. I have things to say, and the window for saying them is narrower than I'd like. Dr. Paulson tells me I have time, but he says it the way people say there's still daylight left when the sun is already behind the trees.

He set the pen down and looked around the kitchen. The house at 412 Elm Street was the only home he and June had ever owned—a two-story clapboard built in 1921, white with green shutters that he'd repainted every four years until his knees gave their formal notice. The kitchen had been June's domain, though she'd never been territorial about it. She'd cooked in it and graded papers in it and argued with him in it and laughed in it, and now he sat in it alone most evenings with the Waterman pen and a stack of paper and the feeling that if he could just get the words right, something might be mended.

Covenant, Iowa, was the kind of town that people described as "small" and meant it in every dimension—population, ambition, geography. It sat in Buchanan County like a coin dropped in a wide field, surrounded by corn and soybean acreage that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The town had a Main Street with a hardware store, a diner called Rosie's, a Lutheran church, a Catholic church, a library that Robert had helped stock for thirty years, and not much else. People who grew up in Covenant either stayed forever or left completely, and the ones who left rarely explained why in terms the ones who stayed could understand.

Louise had left.

She had been twenty-two, fresh from the University of Iowa, already accepted into the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She had been bright and sharp and furious, and she had stood in this kitchen—right there, by the counter where the toaster still sat—and told Robert that what he had done was unforgivable.

He picked up the pen again.

I want to tell you about your mother. Not the parts you already know—you knew her better in some ways than I did, the way daughters know their mothers. I want to tell you the parts I've been carrying. I'm seventy-four years old, Louise, and some of what I'm carrying is getting too heavy for a man whose mind is starting to set things down without permission.

He wrote for an hour. When he finished, he folded the letter into thirds, slid it into an envelope, and wrote her name on the front. He did not write an address. He did not know her current address—she'd moved twice since the last one he'd had, and his attempts to find the new one through the internet had been defeated by his limited understanding of the internet and his unwillingness to ask for help.

He placed the envelope on the growing stack at the corner of the table. There were eleven letters there now, neat and white and going nowhere.

Robert turned off the kitchen light, checked the lock on the back door, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom he had shared with June for forty years and slept in alone for eighteen. The bed was made with the quilt June's mother had sewn—a pattern of interlocking stars in blue and cream. He sat on the edge and removed his shoes, his socks, his watch. The watch was a Timex he'd worn since 1986. The face was scratched but still readable.

He lay down and stared at the ceiling.

"I'm writing to her," he said to the empty room. He had taken to speaking aloud in the evenings—not to June's ghost, exactly, but to the space she had occupied, which still felt shaped by her absence. "I don't know if it helps. But I'm doing it."

The house settled around him. Downstairs, the clock ticked. Outside, an October wind moved through the elm trees that gave the street its name, and Covenant, Iowa, did what it had always done: it held still while the world turned.