The Way We Love Each Other
Rebecca Meacham
1.
is like the time a package came for me postmarked from Ireland, and I said, I didn’t order anything from Ireland, did you?, since you’d retired and moved from another state into a house you’d built onto my house
—I like to say that, a house built onto my house, like a storybook, as if our houses were lashed together from lush palm fronds—
instead of us standing in the driveway as I held a box of unknown origin addressed to me.
We’d seen Nightly News horrors—Una-bombs, anthrax. But mail had delivered one of our best family stories, like when a box arrived with my name on it—a tiny, paper-covered box, mailed to me, a six-year-old just moved to town, and inside was a pack of Wild Cherry Lifesavers with a note of apology from the kindergarten classmate who’d stolen my pack at our moving-away party. This was months after my brother had died, and you and dad and I were a sudden family of three in a house thousands of miles away, and one new thing you and I did together was walk to the end of our driveway to collect the mail from a can with a red metal flag. What I’m saying is that when we needed it, mail had brought us sweetness, care, relief.
Now, I held the strange package at arm’s length. I set it on the table by our garage.
We stared.
Well. The box wasn’t going to open itself.
You were 80 years old, walking three miles daily, doting on your grandkids who called you Nana, so that when they barged through our door and into your house, they’d announce, “We’re going over to Nana’s!”
“I think you should open the box,” I said.
“Go get me my knife,” you said.
2.
But the way we love each other is also like this: you cut the packing tape gently—snip, pause, snip—averting your eyes like a bomb defusal heist scene. I took cover behind you. We laughed at our cowardice, my callousness, your heroism, the way the package could be forgotten online shopping or terrorism.
You opened the box.
Nothing popped.
“What’s this?” you asked.
Inside the box were tins of Irish breakfast tea.
I’d just quit drinking. I’d hadn’t told anyone, not even you, afraid it wouldn’t stick. I was studying teas like I’d studied gin botanicals, steering the churn so my mind wouldn’t drown.
Growing up, you’d hauled your dad’s muscatel bottles to the trash. Your brother traveled with his own Bombay Sapphire. At a family reunion, your sister dropped an empty fifth on a glass table. Nothing shattered, but still, she cried. Now I understood the momentary relief of not breaking something that, by all rights, should have broken.
“Tea,” I said. “This must be the tea I ordered.”
I’d been waiting for that tea.
I think we both knew why.
Then we went inside and— at the hallway door—walked back into our separate houses.
Rebecca Meacham is the author of two award-winning fiction collections and a hybrid prose chapbook, Feather Rousing. Her prose has been set to music, reimagined in thread, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller. Read more of her work here.
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