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

He’d noticed us, of course.

A carriage with a gray Percheron parked in front of your house at seven in the morning for six days in a row is not subtle.

Ellen froze.

The old man put down the hose and walked slowly to the gate. He was about seventy-five, straight-backed, in a cardigan. He looked at Duke. Then at me. Then at the woman in the camel coat sitting in my carriage.

And his face changed.

He went pale. He put his hand on the gate to steady himself.

“Lorraine?” he said.

Ellen couldn’t speak.

“No, sir,” I said, because somebody had to. “This is her daughter. Ellen.”

He stood there for a very long time.

“She looks exactly like her,” he whispered.

He opened the gate.

We sat on the porch of the yellow house. Thomas Ashby was seventy-six. A retired high school history teacher. A widower. He had lived in that house his entire life.

He and Lorraine had been seventeen. They’d been in love the summer of 1968. Her father had found out. Her father was a powerful man in Charleston, and Thomas’s father was the man who mowed his lawn. There were a lot of reasons, in 1968, why a girl like Lorraine wasn’t allowed to love a boy like Thomas.

Her father sent her to an aunt in Chicago in August.

“She promised she’d write,” Thomas said. “She never did.”

Ellen held out the envelope with shaking hands.

“She did,” she said. “She just didn’t send it.”

He took it.

He opened it very carefully, like it might fall apart. Reading glasses from his cardigan pocket.

He read it in silence.

Then he lowered the letter, took off his glasses and looked out at the street.

“She was pregnant,” he said.