Card

On the fourth week a letter arrived with no return address. The envelope was cream-colored, square, with Doris's name in a careful handwriting that Meg did not recognize. Inside, a single card:

Come home.

No signature. No date. Just those two words in the same careful hand, centered on heavy stock.

"Well," Doris said. She set the card on the kitchen table and went back to washing dishes. Meg watched the suds climb her forearms.

"Do you know who—"

"No."

The kitchen smelled like lemon soap and the lavender Doris grew in window boxes. Outside, the neighbor's sprinkler traced its slow arc. Meg picked up the card. The paper was expensive. The kind you buy at a stationery shop, not a drugstore.

"It could be from Helen," Meg said.

Doris's hands stopped in the water. Just for a moment. Then the washing resumed.

"Helen's been dead eleven years."

"I know that. I meant it could be from someone associated with—"

"I know what you meant."

Meg set the card down. She'd lived with Doris for three years, which was long enough to know when a conversation had ended and long enough to know that Doris's silences were not empty. They were full rooms with the doors closed. You could hear furniture being moved inside.

The second card came on a Tuesday. Same envelope, same handwriting, same heavy stock.

The garden misses you.

This time Doris read it at the mailbox. Meg saw her through the kitchen window—the way she held the card at arm's length, the way her chin lifted. The way she stood there for a full minute after reading it before walking back inside and placing it on top of the first one.

"There's no garden," Doris said. "Wherever this is supposedly from, there's no garden."

"How do you know if you don't know who sent it?"

"Because I've never had a garden. Window boxes are not a garden."

Meg looked at the lavender. Three varieties, carefully tended, rotated with the seasons. The window boxes had drainage systems Doris had engineered herself, with gravel layers and moisture-wicking fabric. Doris had once spent an entire Saturday calibrating the soil acidity for one box.

"Okay," Meg said.

The third card arrived the following Monday.

The light is different here in the afternoon.

Doris read it standing in the hallway. She read it twice. Then she took all three cards to her desk in the spare room and spread them out side by side. Meg found her there an hour later with a magnifying glass.

"The serifs," Doris said, not looking up. "They're slightly different on each card. The pen pressure changes. Whoever's writing these is doing them one at a time, not from a template."

"That's a strange thing to check."

"Is it."

"Most people would be wondering what they mean."

Doris set down the magnifying glass. She looked at Meg the way she sometimes did—with an expression that was neither warm nor cold, that seemed to be calculating something about the distance between them.

"I know exactly what they mean," Doris said. "I'm checking whether they're real."

Meg waited.

"Real means someone sat down with a pen, three separate times, and chose these words. Not real means a machine or a prank or someone who doesn't mean it. The serifs tell me it's real."

"But you don't know who—"

"I don't need to know who. I need to know whether someone means it."

The fourth card arrived on Thursday, breaking the weekly pattern.

I left the door unlocked.

Doris didn't show this one to Meg. Meg found it later, tucked inside a book on Doris's nightstand—a paperback about soil composition that Doris had been reading for weeks. The card was being used as a bookmark. Page 203: a chapter on what happens to nutrients when ground lies fallow.

Meg put the book back exactly as she'd found it.

That night Doris made dinner in silence. Roasted chicken, potatoes, the salad she always made with radishes from the farmer's market. She ate slowly, methodically, the way she did everything. Meg watched her cut each piece of chicken into identical squares.

"You're going," Meg said.

Doris set down her fork.

"I don't know where it is."

"But if you did."

The sprinkler outside had stopped. The kitchen was very quiet. Doris picked up her fork, put it down again.

"Meg."

"Yes."

"Would you water the lavender?"

Meg looked at the window boxes. Three varieties, carefully tended. Drainage systems with gravel layers and moisture-wicking fabric. A Saturday spent on soil acidity.

"Yes," Meg said.

The fifth card never came. Meg checked the mail every day for two months. She watered the lavender. She kept the cards in the kitchen drawer, stacked neatly, held together with a rubber band.

On the first truly cold morning, she noticed the lavender in the east-facing box had changed. Not died—changed. The stems were thicker, the leaves darker, the flowers a shade she hadn't seen before. She leaned close. The soil smelled different. Richer. Like something underneath had finally broken down into what the roots had been waiting for.

She went inside and wrote a card of her own. Heavy stock, careful handwriting, no return address.

It bloomed.

She addressed it to the house. Her own house. She walked to the mailbox in her slippers and placed it inside and put up the little red flag.

Then she went back to the kitchen and waited for the mail.