PART 3 — WHAT JUNIA DID
Two years ago I moved out of the rented place on Fennimore into a small house I finally managed to buy, and Junia came over on a Saturday to help me clear the attic.
She found the box at about eleven in the morning.
I was downstairs. She was up there for forty minutes and did not make a sound, and when she came down she had the whole thing in her arms and her face was completely dry and completely white.
She said one thing. She said, “You sent every one.”
And I said yes.
She sat at my kitchen table for three hours and read them. Not all of them. Enough.
Then she asked me two questions.
The first was whether her sisters knew, and I said no, and she said, “They’re going to.”
The second was about the handwriting on the sixty.
I told her the truth. She got up and went out to her car and sat in it for a while, and when she came back in she said, “Okay,” and that was the whole conversation.
Over the following months she told her sisters. All of it, one at a time, at her own pace, in her own way, and she handled it better than I would have. Willa did not speak to me for six weeks and then came over and hugged me in the driveway and neither of us said anything about it, and that was that.
And in the last year before the wedding, Junia did something I knew nothing about until three days before it happened, when she sat me down and told me because she did not want me blindsided at my own daughter’s reception.
She found Roland Frayne.
Not hard — the man’s name is on a building in Bristow Vale. She went to his office in the March, made an appointment under her own name, sat down across the desk from him and said she was Sabina’s daughter.
And Roland Frayne said, “Sabina doesn’t have children.”
He said it politely. He said it the way you correct somebody about a bus timetable.
Fifteen years. He had been married to that woman for thirteen of them. He had two grown children of his own from his first marriage — the new family in her text message — and neither they nor he had ever been told that six girls existed.
Junia said he did not believe her for about four minutes and then he did, all at once, and then he asked her to wait while he went out of the room, and came back after eleven minutes.
She showed him three of the letters. She had brought three, in her purse, and she did not tell him about the other two hundred and eight.
Then she asked him one question, which is the smartest thing anybody in this entire story ever did.
She asked whether he would be at the wedding.
He said he had not been invited.
And my daughter said, “You are now.”
She told me all of it three days before the wedding, at my kitchen table, on a Wednesday night.
I did not take it well for the first ten minutes. I want that on the record because I have been given more credit in this business than I earned.
I said she was inviting a scene into her own wedding. I said she would be the one who had to live with the photographs. I said — and this is the thing I actually regret — that she was doing it for her mother’s benefit, because even a terrible scene is still attention.
Junia let me finish.
Then she said, “Dad, you kept two hundred and eleven letters in an attic so that we wouldn’t have to see a stamp. For fifteen years. You never once let us know what she was.”
I said that was the point.
And she said, “I know. And I’m not angry about it. But it meant that for fifteen years, the only person in this county who ever paid for what she did was you.”
I did not have anything to say to that.
She said, “I’m not doing it to hurt her. I’m doing it because she is going to walk into my wedding and say a version of my life out loud in front of a hundred and fifty people, and I have decided that I get to be the one holding the other version when she does.”
Then she asked me if I wanted her to call it off, and she meant it, and she would have.
I said no.
I have been asked since whether I should have said something different. I do not think so. She was twenty-four years old and she had thought about it for two years and she was right about the thing that mattered, which was that somebody was going to be paying for that woman at that wedding, and it was not going to be me again.
