She did not reply, which meant perhaps she was doing the harder arithmetic, the one that required her to say aloud to her oldest daughter what she had let her youngest carry alone for five years. I did not press. Some letters you send and do not wait by the mailbox for.
A card arrived in my mailbox on a Tuesday. No stamp. Marcy must have dropped it on one of her rounds.
Construction paper, folded unevenly. Orange crayon. A drawing of a house with a table inside and two stick figures, one tall with yellow hair, one short with brown.
Inside: I miss you, Aunt Dana. Come eat at our house. Love, Aiden.
And at the bottom, in the careful separate letters of a child who has just learned to write a postscript: P.S. I sit in your chair now. It’s wobbly.
I put that card on my refrigerator with a palmetto tree magnet, and I did not cry, though almost. The almost is important. The feeling was there, present and available, and I let it be there.
I chose what to do with it instead of being chosen by it. That is still new. I am still learning the difference between feeling something and being required to act on it immediately, which are not at all the same entry in the record.
I drove down Rutledge Avenue two Sundays after Marcy’s visit, not on purpose, coming back from the farmer’s market by the route my hands drive when I am not directing them. I slowed as the house came alongside. Enough to see through the dining room window the way you see through a window when you used to live on the other side of the glass.
The table was there. Same pine. Same plates arranged by Britt’s geometry.
My chair, the one with the wobbly left leg, the one my father used to tell me to sit in so I could see the whole room, was gone. In its place: a box-store chair with a plastic cushion and metal legs. New.
Clean. No history to it whatsoever. They had replaced my chair before they had replaced my payment.
I drove on. Did not look back. The Cooper River was on my left and the November sun was doing what it does in Charleston at that hour, hanging low and golden and making everything look more beautiful than it actually is, which is perhaps the city’s longest-running and most successful tradition.
I got home at 6:51. Made salmon and rice, plated it on a real plate, because I decided three weeks into the new apartment that I was done eating over the sink like a woman who is not sure she has earned a table. I sat down.
Poured water. Picked up my fork. And then, out of the last remaining habit, the one I have not tried to break and perhaps do not want to, I looked at my wrist.
My father’s watch. The old Seiko with the face that does not crack. 7:22.
October 6th at 7:22, I was on a kitchen floor in my mother’s house with the whole room laughing above me and sixty months of automated transfers behind me and a smile I did not know I owned finding its way onto my face for the first time. November, at 7:22, I was at my own table in my own apartment in a silence I had chosen, eating food I had made for myself, with my father’s watch on my wrist and forty years of good oak grain under my hands. Same time.
Different floor. Entirely different record. My fingers moved on the table.
The steno reflex. But this time they were not recording someone else’s testimony. They were not typing Britt’s performance or my mother’s calculations or a judge’s ruling on somebody else’s broken family.
They were moving at a different pace. Slower. Deliberate.
Not transcription. Something else. I was writing.
I did not know yet what it would become. Maybe a letter to nobody in particular. Maybe the first sentence of something longer.
Maybe just the sound of my own hands discovering that they were capable of composing rather than only recording, that they had always been capable of it, and had simply spent six years in service of other people’s words when they had their own words waiting. My name is Dana Merritt. I am twenty-nine years old.
I am a court reporter in Charleston, South Carolina, and for the first time in six years, the record I am entering is mine. I do not eat on anyone’s floor anymore.
