Señora Ruelas

The envelope was on the silver tray at breakfast, by itself, which meant Dame M had decided it should be.

Pale blue, airmail, though it had come no further than California. His name on the front in a careful old hand that leaned to the right, in pencil, and under it, as an address, only Columbia Palace, New Westminster, and, underlined twice, PERSONAL. FROM 22ND ST.

He knew the hand. He had seen it once before, on the back of a photograph of a lizard.

“Open it,” said his mother.

He opened it at the table.

---

Two pages, in Spanish, in the same pencil, close-written, both sides. And a photograph, folded inside, of the kind that comes out of a chemist’s machine in ten minutes.

He looked at the photograph first.

A street of wooden houses, old ones, pale blue and yellow, with porches. He knew it. And in the middle, between the blue one and the yellow one, on a bare patch of ground, a frame. Raw new timber, pale gold in the sun, the uprights and the joists and the rafters all standing up against a blue sky like the drawing of a house, with nothing in between them yet but air. On the ground in front of it, a low wall. On the wall, in a long row, roses, in bud, their leaves very green.

In front of the roses, on a folding chair, with a stick across her knees and a straw hat on her head, a very small, very old woman, looking at the camera as though she would like to know what it thought it was doing.

---

Federico, the letter began.

Not Your Majesty. Not Sir. Federico, which was nobody’s name for him and was, he saw at once, hers.

I am writing in Spanish because I write English like a cow. Rosa says you will understand. Rosa says you understand Spanish like a teacher. I said a teacher is not a compliment, and she said in your case it is.

He laughed. His mother looked at him over her coffee.

The house is going up. You will see in the picture. My son is building it with his hands and with three men from the church and with a great deal of advice from me, which he does not take. It is on the same ground. The same size. The kitchen at the back, where it was.

An inspector came from the city in February. A young man with a tablet. He explained to me for one hour about the code, the new code, about the timbers and the bolts and how it must stand if the ground moves again. He said, Señora, this is all because of 1988. I said, young man, I remember 1988. I was forty. He did not know what to say. He said, then you know. I said, I know the money went to the Valley and not to us, and I know this time the money came to my son, to this street, and I know why, because Rosa read it to me from the newspaper. On the damage, she said. Not on the house. He wrote that down on his tablet. I do not know why.

Frederick stopped reading.

He read that paragraph again. Then he went on.

The kitchen table will go back exactly where it was. I have measured. My son says it does not matter. I said it matters to me, because it is the table that held, and a table that has held a house up deserves to be in the same place.

Under it I will keep a radio.

The roses lived. They did not notice anything. Roses are like that.

---

He read the second page more slowly.

I am very old and I have been told I am a hero, by a lady from the Governor’s office, which I am not. I got down because you said. That is all. Rosa got the medal, the little one, for digging, and she wears it to school on a Friday, which I am told is not allowed, and she does it anyway, which is right.

Now I have a question.

Under the table you told me about your father. You told me he held your mother’s hand on a wheel in Vienna the whole way round and said it was for her. I said he is a liar. I have thought about this for ten months. I would like to know, if you will ask him, whether I was right.

Come and see the house when it has walls. You are still too thin. I can tell from the television.

Esperanza Ruelas

And under the name, in a different hand, younger, in blue ink:

She made me post it before she’d let me have breakfast. R.

---

At four o’clock he read it to his father at the end of the kitchen table, in Spanish, slowly, the way he read the arrivals, and then again in English, because his father’s Spanish had gone with most of his words in September and had come back, Niamh said, in pieces, like a jigsaw found in a drawer.

His father listened with his whole face.

At I remember 1988, I was forty, he made the small sound that was nearly a laugh.

At a table that has held a house up deserves to be in the same place, he looked down at the kitchen table under his own hands, the long scrubbed pine one, which had been moved a foot in December and not moved back.

At Under it I will keep a radio, he shut his eyes.

His mother had come in at a quarter past and was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, listening. She had not said anything.

Frederick got to the question.

“I would like to know, if you will ask him, whether I was right.” He put the page down. “That’s the end. Then she says to come and see the house. And that I’m too thin.”

His father opened his eyes.

He did not look at Frederick. He looked past him, at the doorway, at the woman in it with her arms folded.

The breath. The hold. The lips trying the shape, once, and again, a long sentence, Frederick could see it, longer than any since the abbey, coming up from wherever they came from now, one piece at a time.

“Tell,” said his father. “Her.”

A breath.

“Not. Lie.”

Frederick waited.

His father was still looking at the doorway.

“Hand,” said his father. “Was.” The longest breath. “For. Me.”

---

In the doorway his mother unfolded her arms.

She stood there for a moment. Then she came across the kitchen, past Bridget at the sink, who had turned the tap off and was standing very still with her back to all of them, and past the range, to the end of the table, and stood beside the chair.

She looked down at her husband.

He looked up at her.

She put out her hand, palm up, the way he put his out on a blanket for Frederick, the way you hold out a hand to somebody under a table.

His father looked at it.

Then, slowly, from the arm of the chair, he took it.

Frederick picked up the letter and the photograph from the table and got up, quietly, and went out of the kitchen, and down the stone corridor to the north wing door, and sat on the step in the April sun, which was warm for the first time that year, and read the letter again from the beginning, with the photograph on his knee, the timber frame going up against a blue sky behind a row of roses that had not noticed anything.

After a while he took a pen out of his pocket. A cheap blue ballpoint with the end chewed. ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL. He had taken it out of the drawer in January and had been carrying it since.

He wrote on the back of the photograph, under her hat, small:

He says you were wrong. He says it was for him. He said it in front of her. F.

Then he thought about it, and added:

I will come when it has walls.