A Woman Booked My Carriage in Charleston Every Morning for Seven Days, and Every Morning She Asked Me to Drive Past the Same House. On the Last Day, She Told Me Whose House It Was

The second morning, the same thing.

The third morning, she brought two cups of coffee and handed one to me.

The fourth morning, she asked Duke’s age, where I bought him, why I’d quit law. I told her about the heart attack. She told me she was a cardiologist.

“That’s either very lucky or very unlucky for me,” I said.

She almost laughed.

“Do you take your medication?” she asked.

“Every day.”

“Do you exercise?”

“I walk next to a two-thousand-pound horse for nine hours a day.”

“That counts,” she said.

On the fifth morning, she talked about her mother.

Her mother had grown up in Charleston. She’d left when she was eighteen, in 1968, moved to Chicago, married, had a daughter, became a nurse. She never came back to South Carolina. Not once. Not for a vacation. Not for a funeral.

She had died in March.

“Alzheimer’s,” Ellen said. She’d told me her first name by then. “The last two years, she didn’t know who I was. But she talked about this street. Every day. A yellow house. A boy who lived there.”

“What was his name?”

“She never said. Just ‘the boy in the yellow house.’ She’d say, ‘I have to go back and tell him.’ And I’d say, ‘Tell him what, Mama?’ And she’d look at me like I was a stranger and say, ‘You know.'”

Duke shifted his weight in the street. A delivery truck went by.

“I found the address in a shoebox after the funeral,” Ellen said. “With a photograph. And a letter she wrote in 1968 that she never mailed.”

“Have you read it?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been trying to read it for six months. I came all the way here to read it in front of the house. And I can’t even open it.”

She took it out of her purse. An old envelope, cream-colored, the edges soft from handling.

On the front, in faded blue ink, it said:

*For Thomas.*

On the sixth morning, there was someone standing at the gate of the yellow house.

An old man. Tall. White hair. Holding a garden hose.

Watching us.