The Secret Letters Read Online Free Page A

“Looks like it.”
    â€œBut she was married to Dad then.”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œHoly shit.” I put the envelope down. “She had an affair?”
    â€œIt sure looks that way.”
    â€œUnbelievable.” I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of Mom having a lover. She was always a big, big girl, but she was very attractive, maybe because she had a lot of personality and could turn it on to charm people when she wanted. In old pictures she wore skintight hip-huggers, miniskirts, hot pants, platform shoes, in spite of her size, just daring anyone to tell her she shouldn’t. When I was little, I thought she was as beautiful as a queen.
    â€œI had to tell someone.” Pam didn’t have to add that Ricky was too much of a basket case to handle it, Tim would find a way to use it against us, and Norma would just be Norma. When we were kids, Donny and I were a team and everyone else was on the outside, but since he had died, Pam and I had gotten to be the same way, and while I wouldn’t say she could ever take his place, we had a clear understanding that it was us against the world, or at least against Norma and Tim.
    â€œWow,” I said. “Way to go, Mom, sticking it to Dad like that. God knows that bastard deserved it.” Somewhere she probably still had the snapshots she used in court when she had finally had enough. He smacked the hell out of Tim and Donny, too, when he could catch them. The girls were his princesses, so he never laid a hand on us, but we saw plenty of stuff we couldn’t forget—at least, I couldn’t. Our dad was a nice enough guy now that he had twenty years of sobriety, or so he claimed, and lived in Florida with his third wife. We saw him every so often and everyone acted like things were fine and had always been fine, except Tim, who had moved as far away as hecould get.
    â€œI know, I felt the same way. I was glad that in all those years with him, she wasn’t just totally miserable. She had someone special in her life.”
    â€œYeah.” I picked up another envelope and turned it over, feeling the smooth old paper. I tried to imagine who the writer could have been and how she met him. From the postmarks, you could see he traveled around—maybe he was a salesman, like my dad. My mind started working on something to do with the postmarks, but Pam interrupted me.
    â€œHave you ever felt that way about anyone?”
    â€œWhat way?”
    â€œYou know, like you’re sick from wanting someone so bad.”
    â€œNot exactly. I mean, a few guys have made me sick, but basically, no. You?”
    â€œNo. I mean, I really loved Philly.” She had married Phil right after law school and they broke up when he got a job in Cleveland and wanted her to go with him. She said there was no fucking way she would move to Cleveland, not even for him, and for a while they commuted, but that didn’t work. To be honest, I thought he was boring, but when he finally dumped Pam for a woman in his firm, she was a mess and I felt bad for her. “And Gerald. He was fun.” Gerald was a bartender she dated on the rebound from Phil, and there had been lots more rebounds after that. “But nobody ever wrote me love letters. Not like these.” She fanned herself with a letter. “How about you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBrandon?” Brandon was my ex-husband.
    â€œI can’t remember.”
    â€œYou married him. You must have felt something.”
    â€œI don’t know. I think it was all about the wedding.”
    â€œIt was a nice wedding.”
    â€œI can’t remember it. I guess I hit the open bar a little too hard.”
    Actually, I could remember it: me in a dumb white dress that made me look like a fat poodle, Brandon looking miserable in a rented tux, a DJ who kept playing horrible old songs my mother liked, then our one-night honeymoon in Ocean City in a cheap hotel with carpeting on the