The One Who Wasn't Sorry to Be Right

Peg Anders had known Carol since the third grade, and she said so before Mara had finished introducing herself.

"I know exactly who you are," Peg said, from behind a screen door in Ogden that she did not open. "You've got her exact walk. Like you're apologizing to the sidewalk for using it."

"I have a letter—"

"I assumed. She was thirty years overdue on several things." Peg opened the door at last, but grudgingly, the way a woman opens a door she has rehearsed keeping shut. "Sit wherever. Don't touch the cat."

The letter, when Peg read it, did not make her cry the way Ruth had, or go still the way Edwin had. It made her laugh, once, short and sharp.

"She's apologizing for telling everyone in town I stole Frank Delray from her, when the truth is I did steal Frank Delray, and Carol knew it, and never said a word for forty years because she thought silence was the generous thing." Peg folded the letter, not carefully, and set it under a coffee mug like a coaster. "That's the trouble with your mother. She'd rather carry a grudge alone for half a century than risk one uncomfortable Tuesday."

"You're not going to forgive her?"

"I forgave her the week it happened. I'm still deciding whether to forgive her for waiting until she was dead to ask." Peg studied Mara over her glasses, not unkindly. "You want to know the real thing about Carol Vance? She thought being good meant being invisible. Never asking for anything, never costing anybody anything, never making a single wave in fifty years of living near water. It's a hell of a way to love people, and I'm not sure it ever once worked."

Mara thought about the box on her passenger seat, twenty-some names deep, every single one of them a wave Carol had refused to make while she was alive and could not stop making now that she wasn't.

"There was a girl," Peg said suddenly, as Mara stood to leave. "Some business with a bus, years and years back, before you were old enough to remember it clearly. Carol never talked about it, not once, in fifty years of friendship. That's how you knew it mattered. She only ever went quiet about the ones that mattered."

Mara's hand found the doorframe. "What girl?"

But Peg was already ushering the cat off the windowsill, her face closed the way Edwin's had been, the way Ruth's almost wasn't. "Ask your father," she said. "I've said more than I meant to as it is."