Chapter 23 - The Red Bicycle BellBefore I left, he went inside.
When he returned, he carried a small wooden case.
“I kept something.”
He handed it to me.
Inside was a red bicycle bell.
Old.
Scratched.
I recognized it immediately.
The bicycle from my twelfth birthday.
My mother had sold it after I left for college.
“I bought the bicycle,” he said. “Your mother told me later you loved it.”
I held the bell in my palm.
“How did you get this?”
“She mailed it to me years later.”
I looked up sharply.
“What?”
“She wrote to me.”
“When?”
“After you left for college.”
That didn’t fit.
“She never told me.”
“I know.”
He went inside again.
This time, he returned with a single envelope.
My name was written on the front.
Not in my mother’s handwriting.
In his.
“I wrote this when you were twenty-one,” he said.
“Why didn’t you send it?”
“I did.”
I stared at him.
“It came back.”
He turned it over.
Across the front was an old postal marking.
RETURN TO SENDER.
ADDRESS UNKNOWN.
“I tried again later,” he said quietly. “By then, you’d moved.”
I looked at the envelope.
“Why didn’t you find me after I started the company?”
He looked toward the yard.
“I did.”
That answer surprised me.
“You did?”
“I read about you.”
“Then why didn’t you contact me?”
He was silent for a long time.
“Because by then, you had built a life.”
“That didn’t answer the question.”
“No.”
He rubbed his hands together.
“Your mother wrote to me shortly before she died.”
Every part of me went still.
“She wrote to you?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
He looked at me with an expression I could not read.
Then he reached into the wooden case again.
There was another envelope beneath the bicycle bell.
My mother’s handwriting.
My name was not on it.
His was.
Thomas.
I looked from the envelope to him.
“You still have it.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the last letter she ever sent me.”
I held out my hand.
He hesitated.
Not to keep it from me.
To make sure I understood what I was asking.
Then he placed it in my palm.
“Before you read it,” he said, “there’s something you should know.”
I waited.
He looked toward the street.
“When Margaret wrote that letter, she wasn’t asking me to stay away.”
My fingers tightened around the envelope.
“She was asking me to come see you.”
I stared at him.
“Then why didn’t you?”
He lowered his eyes.
“Because by the time I received it, she had died.”
The porch seemed suddenly very quiet.
I looked at the letter.
Then back at my father.
His voice softened.
“And there was one more reason.”
“What reason?”
He looked at me again.
“Your mother told me something about you that I never knew if she had told anyone else.”
I felt a familiar pull in my chest.
Another unfinished sentence.
Another piece of the past waiting to be understood.
“What did she tell you?”
May you like
He glanced at the envelope in my hand.
“It’s in the letter.”
