He had been looking at me with an expression I had not fully understood then.
Perhaps I had simply taken it for granted.
Now, he was spending his evenings in the yellow house.
He sat at the kitchen table with Rosie, drawing maps of Lake Huron.
I traced the edge of the glossy paper with my thumb.
The realization did not come with a sudden rush.
It came with the steady weight of something that had been sitting in the room all along.
My feelings for him had not faded over the years.
They had only grown heavier, shifting from the light affection of youth into something sharp and persistent.
He was turning away from me, and I did not know how to pull him back.
I stared at the seventeen-year-old boy in the photograph.
His hand was almost touching mine on the wooden railing of the exhibition barn.
The bulb in my desk lamp flickered once, casting long, thin shadows across the walnut wood.
The brass tray on my mother’s desk held three rusted paperclips and a single bone button, but no stamps. I needed eighteen of them for the church auxiliary newsletter, and Eleanor had assured me they were in the middle drawer of my father’s rolltop desk.
My father’s study was always kept locked on weekends, but on Monday mornings the oak door stood slightly ajar to let the warmth from the hallway radiator circulate. The air inside was heavy with the scent of old paper and the lemon wax my mother used on the cherry wood desk.
I walked past the leather armchair, my soft-soled shoes silent on the green wool rug. The desk itself was a massive piece of furniture, bought at an estate sale in Grand Rapids thirty years ago.
I slid the heavy oak drawer open, the scent of cedar and dried ink rising into the quiet of the study. Inside lay neat rows of legal pads, three fountain pens wrapped in a felt cloth, and a box of heavy cream envelopes.
