The opening was simple.
Mr. Vance told him that Noah had probably assumed those Saturday mornings meant very little because the two of them had barely talked.
Four words.
Four years behind them.
Noah pressed his lips together and kept reading.
The letter wasn’t written like some dramatic farewell, and it didn’t sound like the kind of speech people suddenly become capable of only because they know they are dying.
It sounded like Mr. Vance.
Plain.
Careful.
Almost uncomfortable with emotion.
He wrote about the years after his wife died and how the house had become too quiet for him.
The porch chair where we had seen him sitting every afternoon had once been where he and his wife ended their days together, sometimes talking and sometimes simply watching cars move along the neighborhood street.
After she was gone, the chair stayed.
Mr. Vance stayed too.
But the life around him kept moving.
