Doris held the letter at arm's length, tilting it toward the window. She read the way she drove — leaning back, one hand on the wheel, taking the curves slow.
"Oh, that's right," she said. "That's what she called them. Puddle-jumpers."
Meg couldn't answer. She'd made it through the first paragraph without trouble, the part about the weather and the neighbor's dog and the price of gas, all of it rendered in her mother's careful, forward-leaning script. But the second paragraph had opened a door she hadn't known was shut.
I think about you girls sometimes in the evenings when the house gets loud with quiet.
That was all. Her mother had moved on to the tomatoes after that, and then to a question about whether Doris still had that blue coat, and the letter ended with the usual closing, the one that never varied: Take care of each other.
Doris was nodding, that slow nod she used when she was placing something. "Puddle-jumpers. Those rubber boots. Mine were yellow."
"Green," Meg said, or tried to. What came out was closer to a sound.
"Green, that's right. And you'd stomp through every one, and Mom would say—" Doris looked up. "Hey. Hey, what is it?"
Meg shook her head. She folded the letter along its original creases and set it on the table between them. It sat there with the confident flatness of something that had been folded and unfolded many times by someone who was no longer here to do it again.
"It's nothing," Meg said. "She just — she knew."
"Knew what?"
But Meg couldn't say what her mother had known, because saying it would have required explaining the quiet, and the quiet was the thing that had been sitting in Meg's house for eleven months now, and she had not yet found the right name for it, and her mother — from two years ago, from before — had named it anyway, without trying, without even knowing there would be anything to name.
Doris picked up the letter again and squinted at the postmark. "Two thousand twenty-three," she said. "Before everything."
"Yeah."
"She was something, wasn't she."
"Yeah."
Doris refolded it with the same practiced care their mother had used, as if the creases were part of the content. She placed it on the stack with the others and reached for the next envelope.
Meg watched her sister's hands — the same hands, their mother's hands — and thought: you are reading a different letter than I am. You are in the room with the puddle-jumpers and the blue coat and the tomatoes. I am in the room with the quiet. And Mom is in both rooms, because that's what she could do, she could be in both rooms at once and not need you to know which one she meant.
"Ready for the next one?" Doris asked.
Meg nodded. Doris opened it. The paper crinkled like it was glad to be touched.