She wrote, “I called you four years ago. You told me Gary was a good man and that I was the problem. So I waited for you to call back. I want you to know why I finally stopped waiting.”

Then this. “It’s because Gary had already been to see me, Diane. He came to my house. He sat at my kitchen table and told me if I kept talking about that money, you would never speak to me again. And he was right. He knew you’d pick him. He told me to my face that you would. So I stopped, not because I was wrong, but because I couldn’t stand watching him use me to take you. I’d rather lose you quiet than help him do it loud.”

He’d come to her. He sat in her kitchen, where she handed people tomatoes, and he made a deal with my silence. He knew me better than I knew myself. He knew I’d choose him. He bet my own mother that I would, and he won.

The last line of the letter is the one I can’t get past. She wrote, “I’m not mad at you, baby. I just kept the porch light on a lot longer than I should have.”

I don’t know how to end this because it isn’t ended. I haven’t gone back out to that house. I haven’t found Patrice yet to thank her, even though I have her name now, because every time I pick up the phone I think about what I’d even say to the stranger who sat in the chair that should have been mine.

The kids ask about their grandma sometimes. I tell them she grew the best tomatoes you ever ate.

I haven’t told them I let a man under a salt shaker decide they’d never meet her.