The Two Letters

Every Saturday, Aoife helped out in a small second-hand bookshop in Cork. She was sixteen, and she loved the smell of old paper and the stories hidden in the books: train tickets, shopping lists, pressed flowers. One rainy morning, while she was putting a box of poetry books on a shelf, an envelope fell out of one of them. It was yellow with age, and it had never been opened. On the front, someone had written: "For Maura. Please read this before Saturday." The letter was dated May 1974.

Aoife's grandmother was called Maura. It was a common name in Ireland, of course, but Aoife couldn't stop thinking about it. That evening she took the envelope to her grandmother's house and showed it to her. Her grandmother looked at the handwriting for a long time without saying anything. Then she sat down slowly. "I think you'd better open it," she said quietly.

Aoife read the letter out loud. It was from a young man called Daniel. He said that he had gotten a job in Boston and that he was leaving Ireland on Saturday. He said he had wanted to tell her for weeks, but he hadn't been brave enough. He asked her to meet him at the train station at ten o'clock if she felt the same way about him. "If you don't come," he had written, "I'll understand, and I won't write again."

"I never got this," her grandmother said. She explained that Daniel had lent her a book of poems that spring. She had never finished reading it, and a few years later her mother had given away a lot of old books when they moved house. "I thought he had left without saying goodbye," she said. "I was angry with him for years." Then she laughed softly. "And I met your grandfather the following summer, so I can't complain."

But Aoife could see that her grandmother kept looking at the letter. A few days later, she asked her if she wanted to find out what had happened to Daniel. Her grandmother said it was a silly idea, but the next morning she phoned Aoife and asked her how to search for someone on the internet.

It took them two weeks. Daniel was eighty years old now, a retired music teacher living near Boston, and he had a large family. Aoife's grandmother wrote him a letter by hand. She told him that she had found his letter fifty years late, that she had had a happy life, and that she hoped he had too.

His answer arrived a month later. He wrote that he had waited at the station until the very last train, and that he had always wondered why she hadn't come. "Now I know," he wrote, "and I'm glad the reason was a book and not you." Aoife's grandmother put the two letters together in the poetry book and gave it to her granddaughter. "Keep it," she said. "Some stories shouldn't stay on a shelf."