The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart

you have?” she asked.
    I didn’t want to tell her. The thought of her reading the letter pained and embarrassed me. I didn’t want to explain about Sonia. I didn’t want her to know I merited not a final, sentimental gift but a task. “Nothing,” I said. She looked at me sharply, and I braced myself for more questions. But then she blinked, and her face relaxed. She gave me a sad smile. “Okay,” she said.
    I picked up the package and headed for the door. Ruth said nothing as I passed her, but when I looked back, she met my gaze. She looked so small there on the floor, dwarfed by the large room and the enormous quantity of Oliver’s things. When Oliver was alive, she and I had fought about the best way to care for him, but now there was no one else in the world who could understand how much I missed him, how hard it was to accept that he was gone. I went back, sat beside her, and put the package between us on the floor. I handed her the letter.
    As she read, I tried to imagine the other letters, the ones that began
Dear Sonia
or
Dear Oliver,
and went on to dissect me. I felt like I’d joined a laughing crowd only to have a hush fall over them at my arrival, everyone looking away. After the day we argued about Sonia, Oliver had never mentioned her to me again. I’d never seen him writing her a letter, never come upon any replies from her in the mail. I prided myself on being a good liar. Why, then, was I amazed over and over at other people’s capacity for deceit?
    Ruth looked up from the letter. To my relief, she didn’t ask for explanations. She said, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”
    “He pulled out all the stops to make sure I would.”
    “You could just mail it.”
    I shook my head. As betrayed as I felt, I couldn’t bring myself to dismiss the last lines of the letter.
I know you will not refuse me,
he’d said. “I need the money,” I said.
    “I could pay you whatever you would have made. For someone who lived the life of the mind, he actually left behind quite a bit of money.”
    I took the letter back from her. “He said I had to go.”
    “I know how much you hate to disappoint him,” she said quietly. “I know what that’s like. But now he’s dead. You can’t disappoint a dead person.”
    My throat tightened. I certainly felt like I could. Rereading the letter, I heard Oliver’s voice as clearly as if he were in the room, giving me a set of instructions to follow—how to make a sandwich, how to interpret an event, how to deliver a package. When he wrote those words, he was still alive. We both looked at the package. “What do you think is in it?” I asked.
    “Well,” Ruth said. “It’s smaller than a bread box.”
    “It’s also smaller than an elephant.”
    “Yes, but that’s imprecise. Better to say it’s smaller than a bread box.”
    “I’m pretty sure there’s no bread in it,” I said.
    Ruth picked up the package and turned it gingerly in her hands. “He said it’s a wedding present, right? It’s so light. Maybe there’s jewelry in it. Something like the ring he gave you.”
    At this, I felt a surge of anger. “Or maybe it really is empty,” I said. I snatched the package back and gave it a good shake.
    Ruth gasped, her hands flying up. “What if it’s fragile?”
    “Then it’s broken.” I shook it again. A rustling and thumping. So Oliver hadn’t been lying—there was something inside, something for Sonia. “This is going to be awful.” I set the package down, gently now. My anger drained away as I began to worry that I had indeed broken something precious. “Why would he do this to me?”
    Ruth didn’t answer. She was staring at the package, a half-smile playing on her lips. After a moment she said, “Because he was a bit of a bastard. Didn’t you know?”
     
     
    I got Sonia’s number from information. A recording picked up—not even her voice, which I’d been braced to hear for the first time in eight years, wondering if I’d