I had nothing left to ask, but still I was not ready for any information from the dead.
“Are all the people who work for the FCR white?” The question was one my stepfather would have had me ask.
“FRC,” Lance corrected. “Most of the employees of the company are Caucasian but not all. Now, may I deliver my charge?”
I took in a deep breath, exhaled, and then nodded.
Lance Harding reached into the left side of his red-brown jacket with his right hand.
I leaped up from my chair, sure that he was going to take out a gun or a knife — my fear was that great.
But the FRC agent merely brought out an ivory envelope, almost exactly the same color as his skin.
“This is the letter that your brother charged us to deliver,” he said. “As I hand it to you, our duty in this matter is fulfilled.”
He extended the hand, offering me the rectangle of paper. I hesitated before taking it.
The mood was so ceremonial that I expected some kind of devastation or revelation to follow. But nothing happened.
The FRC agent stood abruptly.
“I will leave you to do with the letter as you will,” he said.
“Don’t you want me to sign something?” I asked. “To prove that you actually gave me this?”
“The client didn’t ask for corroboration,” he said, smiling. “That usually means that the delivery contains nothing of material value. I can see myself out.”
I sat there at the messy table, holding the still-sealed envelope, for long minutes after Lance Harding was gone. Something about the white man’s demeanor — coupled with the fact that I had been writing a letter concerning Seth when the strange note from him arrived — was, to say the least, eerie. Something having to do with me not attending his funeral, I thought, and now he was reaching out to me...
I put the letter down and picked up my smartphone. I entered A-N-G, and Angeline’s number appeared.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Where are you?” she said, instead of hello.
“At home.”
“But you’re on your cell.”
“I had the landline disconnected, figured I didn’t need two numbers. People hardly ever call one.”
“You’re not a kid anymore, Roger. Having your phone disconnected makes you seem transient.”
“How’s Boston, Sis?”
“Cold. They’re predicting snow for tomorrow.”
“Snow? It’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”
“How are you, Rog?”
“All right. Have you heard from Seth?”
“What?”
“A letter, package, or somethin’?”
“Seth is dead.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, but a guy just dropped by and hand-delivered a letter to me that Seth had set up before he died.”
Angeline didn’t say a word for at least a minute. This told me more than any confession or lie: whatever it was that Seth was telling me, Angeline knew before I did.
“Did you read it?” she asked at last.
“No. Not yet. I was wondering if he’d sent the same note to you and Mom.”
“You should burn it, Roger,” she said. “Nothing good can come from a dead man’s hand.”
“The guy brought it to me was very much alive.”
“Burn it, shred it, or just throw it away, Roger,” she said, in her best big-sister voice. “You know how Seth was always trying to mess with you.”
“What does it say, Angeline?”
“How do you expect me to know?”
“Don’t you mess with me, Sis.”
“I haven’t heard anything from Seth, and neither has Mom, for all I know. I talked to her last Monday, and she didn’t say anything about any letters.”
“How is Mom?”
“Fine. She said that she hasn’t heard from you in over six months. You know you could go to her house. She’s just a few miles from your place. It’s a shame I see her more often than you do, and here I live three thousand miles away.”
All the anger that I had at my mother and sister and deceased stepfather, Norland Reese, came up in my breast.
“I gotta go, Angeline,” I said.
“Wait, Roger. What about that letter...?”
I pressed the red icon on my smartphone, and the connection was broken. Putting the little device down, I picked up the sealed envelope again.
Seth had terrorized me when we were children. He would lock me in closets and trunks just for a laugh. I learned the value of silence from him. Because if he put me in the big trunk in the attic of our house, I learned that he would never let me out as long as I yelled. But if I was quiet, he worried that maybe I had suffocated or something. He was the kind of torturer who fed off the screams of his victims.
I might have hated my brother, but his brand of torment wasn’t nearly as bad as that of my parents — I should say my mother and her husband Norland. My blood father was a white man named Patrick Hand. The story goes that he abandoned our family when I was two, Angeline was four, and Seth five.
“He just ran off and left me with three children and a dollar seventy-five,” my mother would say. Then she’d spit on the ground, cursing him.
Seth never believed that our father abandoned us. Patrick Hand was a known gambler, and Seth was convinced that he had been slaughtered over a bad debt, and that our mother, instead of cursing him, should have gone out looking for his killers.
Norland wouldn’t let Seth tell that tale. He was of my mother’s opinion and ruled over us with an iron fist.
In my mind I managed to believe both Seth and my mother. Sometimes I hated my father; at others I prayed for his murdered soul.
Dear Roger,
I know that we haven’t talked in a long time. We might not ever talk again if what the doctors say about my heart is true. They’re telling me that I better settle up my business because I could die any minute. That’s why I’m writing you this letter. It hurts to admit the truth and so I’m using the Final Request Company to deliver it after I die. I’m not proud of what I did but at least this much is right.
I guess you remember back when you were seventeen and going with that white girl — Timberly Alexander. You broke up with her because Mama and Norland leaned on you so hard. I was mad that you didn’t even tell Timmy why you stopped talking to her and so one day I went over to her house out there in West Covina. I told her how much Mama and Norland thought that interracial relationships only ended in heartbreak. I tried to explain how much you needed Mama and that her rules were too much for you to deny.
That’s when Timberly told me that she was pregnant. She was so broken up because her parents were mad and you wouldn’t even talk to her on the phone.
She was so upset that I told her she could always talk to me. And she did.
For the last twenty years I’ve been giving Timmy a couple hundred dollars a month, and her little girl, Sovie (named after Sojourner Truth), has called me Uncle Seth from the day she could talk.
Timmy didn’t want me to tell you about your daughter because she was mad and hurt that you left her without a word. I probably should have told you but I guess I got a little possessive. I kind of thought of Timmy and Sovie as my little family.
At the bottom of the page is Sovie’s full name and address in Los Angeles. Yes, she lives in L.A. just like you.
Timmy died a year ago from breast cancer and so, when I’m gone, Sovie’s going to be alone in the world.
I’m sorry for keeping this from you, Little Brother. I know it’s worse than anything else I ever did. I hope you can forgive me.