Dear Maggie

For thirty years, Maggie Doyle had answered other people's problems every Thursday on page twenty-four of the Lagan Herald, a small newspaper in Belfast. Her column was called Dear Maggie, and readers wrote to her about everything: unfaithful husbands, lazy teenagers, neighbors who stole their parking spaces. Maggie read every letter herself, with a cup of strong tea and a red pen.

She had a reputation for being kind but honest. "If I were you, I'd stop waiting for him to change," she would write, or "You'd better tell her the truth before somebody else does." People stopped her in the supermarket to thank her. Some of them, she suspected, had never taken her advice at all, but they liked knowing that someone had listened.

On a wet Monday in November, she opened a letter written in small, careful handwriting. It began like hundreds of others. "Dear Maggie, I have not spoken to my sister for twenty-five years. We fell out after our mother's funeral, over a house that neither of us wanted and a few words that both of us should have kept to ourselves."

Maggie read on, and her tea went cold. The writer described a childhood by the sea in Bangor, a red bicycle that he and his sister had shared and fought over, and a dog called Biscuit that was afraid of seagulls. He said his sister had become a writer of some kind, and that he sometimes read her work without telling anyone. The letter was signed "Too Late in Toronto".

Maggie put the letter down very slowly. She had had a red bicycle. She had had a dog called Biscuit. And she had a younger brother, Frank, who had moved to Canada the year after their mother died and had never written, never phoned, never once come home.

His question was simple. "Should I write to her, or is it too late? If she wanted to hear from me, wouldn't she have found me by now?" Maggie had answered that question a hundred times for strangers. She had always known exactly what to say. Now she sat at her desk for three hours and wrote nothing at all.

Her editor, Paul, noticed. "Are you all right?" he asked. "You look as if you've seen a ghost." "Something like that," she said. "Paul, if you got a letter that might be from someone you knew, would you answer it in the paper?" He thought about it. "I'd answer it the way I'd answer anybody," he said. "Honestly. That's why people read you."

That Thursday, Dear Maggie was longer than usual. "Dear Too Late," it began. "If I were you, I would stop asking whether it is too late and start asking what you are waiting for. You ask why your sister hasn't found you. Perhaps she has been asking herself the same question about you. Pride is a very patient thing. It will wait forever if you let it."

"I would advise you to write to her, but not to explain who was right. Nobody wins an argument that is twenty-five years old. Tell her about your life, and ask about hers. It might be worth mentioning the bicycle; she may still think it was hers. And if you are ever in Belfast, you should knock on her door. I suspect she would open it."

She did not finish with her usual line. Instead, at the bottom, she wrote: "P.S. Biscuit was never really afraid of seagulls. He only let you think so, because you liked protecting him."

For two weeks, nothing happened. Then, on a cold Friday morning, the receptionist rang up to say that a man was asking for Maggie downstairs. He was gray-haired, with a Canadian accent he hadn't had before, and he was holding a copy of the Lagan Herald folded open at page twenty-four. "It was my bicycle," Frank said, before she could say a word. Maggie laughed for the first time in weeks. "If you'd like to argue about it," she said, "you'd better come in for a cup of tea."