Addressee Unknown

Sandra could still see a tiny sparkle from the glitter embedded in the carpet’s fibers. She must have vacuumed that area beneath the buffet table in the back of the couch a dozen times since Christmas, yet six weeks later, the glitter was still there, like a guest at a dinner party who refuses to leave. She pictured the two dozen Christmas cards, propped open on the smooth glass surface, carefully arranged like an art exhibit, one breath of wind from a left-open door away from toppling like a row of dominoes. She had learned to arrange them so the ends of each card stood three inches apart. By some miracle, they never fell over. Except one. The one from Lydia of Huntsville, Connecticut. The one with all the glitter.

Hardly anyone sends tacky holiday cards with glitter anymore, thank God. People send custom-made ones with family photos of vacations in Hawaii and preprinted signatures. Merry Christmas from The Lewis Family. Arthur, Michelle, Dana (11), Otis (5), and Shadow the Dog (3). Even those are a dying breed. Hardly anyone sends holiday cards, period.

Sandra ran the red Handy Vac one more time over the edge of the winter wheat carpet, hoping she had finally decimated the last of the unwanted sparkle. Funny how that glittery card showed up every year; not the exact same one, but similar enough to last year’s to be recognizable even before it was opened. Always in a red envelope. Always depicting a fairytale gingerbread cottage with a red roof, mountainous snowbanks in the backdrop (trimmed with glitter), and a sleigh (yes, also trimmed with glitter) drawn by two wide-eyed white horses (ditto) who looked like they were on LSD. Always addressed to her mother.

Sandra had lived in her mother’s house since 1981, the year her mother had passed away after a massive stroke. When the will was read, Sandra was surprised to find out the house had been left not to her but to her bratty second cousin Althea from Baltimore. Althea and Sandra had detested each other as kids, but her mother had always felt sorry for Althea and always reminded Sandra how lucky she was. To have graduated from college, albeit with a useless degree in art. To have a wonderful husband like Nick Robinson, who loved her. To not have an addiction to narcotics like Althea. 

“Althea needs our love,” her mother would say. “We can’t forget about her.”

Mother had too big a heart for her own good. But she was dead wrong about Nick. Sandra wasn’t lucky, and Nick didn’t love her. He didn’t love anybody.

When Althea had received the termite report and saw the $37,000 damage estimate, she sent it to Sandra with a legal form she’d bought at a stationery store, quitclaiming her interest in the property. Sandra remembered staring at the report, wondering where she would get the money to make all the repairs, when she noticed the address at the top was 2115 Evanston, not 1215. Sandra called the termite company and, a week later, received the correct report with a letter of apology. The only damage on the new report was the cellulose debris in the substructure. Estimated cost to repair: $167. So, Sandra kept the house and never told Althea. 

The first Christmas she and Nick spent in the house, a dozen cards arrived from her mother’s distant friends who apparently hadn’t heard she died. Sandra put them on the buffet with the others, thinking the senders would eventually remove her mother from their holiday lists. The next year, only two cards addressed to her mother came: one from The Gorman Family from two blocks away, the other signed only with the name Lydia. Sandra had written a short note to each, explaining her mother had passed away, and mailed them to the return addresses on the envelopes. The Gorman cards stopped, but the Lydia cards continued to arrive every year.

“I just don’t know why this woman keeps sending cards to my mother,” Sandra said to Nick on a Saturday morning three weeks before Christmas of 1992. She watched her husband file his nails between loud slurps of coffee, two annoying habits he saved for weekends. “I’ve written her for ten years now.”

“Maybe she’s just forgetful,” Nick said.

Forgetful like you. Nick hadn’t remembered her birthday in five years.

Sandra remembered how fastidious her mother had been about sending holiday cards, her handwritten list of names and addresses meticulously maintained on white lined paper, a checkmark next to the name of each recipient who’d sent her a card in return. Those who hadn’t were marked with an angry red five-point star, which meant they would receive one more card the following year before being stricken from the list. Her mother always bought her cards on sale the week after Christmas, fifty cards for $1.89, and saved them for next year. They always looked so tacky to Sandra, the red and gold foil trim bordering a manger scene with white people. Why couldn’t she buy the nice ones like the Andersons sent? But her mother loved to run the tips of her fingernails over the line of blue glitter at the top. She liked how it made her hand tingle, how it made her feel alive during the holidays.

Her mother believed in the magic of Christmas. Just like she believed in other fantasies, like the sanctity of marriage, like how a husband who’d left her with two children would come back someday. Her mother never mustered enough self-worth to file for divorce from a man who never really loved her.

And Sandra hadn’t either.

Sandra had found the 1980 Christmas card list in the top drawer of her mother’s cherry wood desk. She used that list to send remembrance cards to out-of-town friends who hadn’t made it to the funeral before packing it in a box with the cards her mother had bought last year on sale, cards that would never be sent. The box was still in the attic with what was left of her mother’s other stuff: the dusty Readers Digest collection, the three stacks of vinyl LPs, and the shit brindle gold-colored vinyl luggage set she bought with S&H green stamps and hadn’t used since the 1960s.

Sandra poured Nick a fresh cup of coffee before asking him to go up to the attic and take down the box. Normally, she wouldn’t have bothered since he seemed not to care whether the coffee was hot or cold. Three hours passed before he finally hauled the step ladder from the garage.

Sandra skimmed the list, its edges now frayed, its delicate lines faded. She was surprised by some of the names. Mrs. Irene Watson. Sandra’s second-grade teacher. Mr. William Robinson II, her mother’s first cousin who became a bank robber and died in prison. Mrs. Leticia Wells, the mother of a boy Sandra had dated in high school. But no one named Lydia from Huntsville, Connecticut.

It seemed odd her mother wouldn’t have sent cards to someone who sent them to her. Her mother had a system for everything, from which bills she paid first out of the household checking account to how she prepared Thanksgiving dinner. She followed the rules, all rules, to a tee. An asymmetrical Christmas card exchange would have driven her nuts.

“Can I put the box back now?” Nick asked, leaning against the ladder, his forefinger picking at his left nostril.

He had no interest in the matter. No curiosity about anything. Was this what happened when you reached a certain age? But no, Nick Robinson had always been this way.

The next morning, as she poured Nick his first cup of coffee, Sandra suggested they go away for their anniversary. “You’re only married for thirty years once.”

“Why not save it for our fortieth?” Nick said.

If you last that long. “We never do anything special, Nick.”

Then she showed him the brochures from four B&Bs in a quaint little town in Connecticut. “Tom and Susie’s daughter Kate spent her honeymoon there.”

“Who are Tom and Susie?” Nick said.

“You remember them. They used to live next door to the church. Moved away after Tom retired.”

Nick shook his head, splashing his coffee on the Formica tabletop.

Of course, he didn’t remember. He probably hadn’t remembered it was their thirtieth anniversary until Sandra mentioned it.

Thirty years. Had it really been that long since Sandra’s brother Hal fixed her up with this “nice guy” from work who ate lunch by himself and never went out? Had it been more than thirty years since that harmless first date when he took her to a bargain matinee and wiped his buttery hands on his trousers after he’d finished his popcorn, then wiped them on her as they made out in the back seat of his Chevy? Thirty years since they’d decided to stay married, even after she had miscarried, and the whole reason they had married in the first place was at the bottom of a medical waste receptacle in her doctor’s office? There was a very good reason Nick ate lunch by himself and never went out.

Of course, he couldn’t have remembered Tom and Susie, because Sandra had made them up. There had been no daughter Kate, and no honeymoon. She enjoyed playing little games with him sometimes. It almost made staying married to him worthwhile.

“Come, look at these. Which one appeals to you?” Sandra said. She arranged the four brochures into a fan. “I like this one,” she said, pointing to the one on top.

Of course, Nick’s attention was focused on one thing. He opened the third brochure and then pushed it toward her. “This one,” he said. “It’s the cheapest.”

The cheapest. And the one she knew he’d pick, for that very reason. So Sandra made the reservation for three nights at the Blossom Creek Inn. At the center of the Town of Huntsville, Connecticut. 

Two Saturdays later, Sandra and Nick got into their Toyota Camry and started the three-and-a-half-hour drive. “I hope the roads are clear,” Nick said as he licked up the tiny puddle of coffee off the top of his car thermos with his long tongue.

“It hasn’t snowed in a month, Nick,” Sandra said.

“Still, it might,” he said. “Did you bring a print-out of the reservation?”

He obviously didn’t care whether she had because he had already put the car in reverse and was backing out of the driveway.

“The confirmation number is in my phone.”

“I just don’t want an argument over the room rate when we get there,” Nick said.

Sandra remembered how, thirty years ago, he tried to renegotiate the price of the suite when they checked into the hotel for their honeymoon.

The car rolled past the stop sign at the end of their block, the first of many traffic-related transgressions he would commit in the next four hours. “Are you sure this is the same place your friends stayed at?”

“Henry and Grace?’

“Yeah, whoever. The ones with the daughter.”

Sandra touched Nick’s right shoulder and squeezed the fatty tissue over his collarbone. “I’m sure, dear,” she said as she dug her thumb deeply into his shoulder—something he mistook for affection.

While Nick listened to the news on the car radio, switching stations seven or eight times between their driveway and the Connecticut border, Sandra read two hundred pages of James Michener’s Hawaii. She had discovered the book at the bottom of the box where she had found her mother’s Christmas card list. She used the most recent of Lydia’s holiday card envelopes as a bookmark. Occasionally, Nick would glance over at her, scratching the side of his wrinkled neck.

“Good book?”

“It’s interesting,” Sandra said. “It’s about the settlement of the islands by Christian missionaries. Did you know they made it into a movie with Julie Andrews?”

“The Mary Poppins chick?”

Sandra opened the back cover. “It’s a library copy,” she said. “My mother must have forgotten to return it years ago.”

“Next thing, you’ll want to make a trip to Hawaii instead of Connecticut.”

“That would be for our fortieth, Nick,” Sandra said, laughing. If you last that long. 

At around three o’clock in the afternoon, they drove up the narrow gravel driveway in front of the Blossom Creek Inn. Nick parked by the front entrance. He got out of the car and looked around.

“I don’t see no blossoms yet,” he said. “Or a creek.”

A short woman, maybe fifty, with frosted blond hair and a beaming smile appeared on the porch. “Welcome,” she said, her arms outstretched. “I’m Sandy Bean. You must be the Robinsons.”

Sandra stepped back. She wasn’t in the mood for a hug from a stranger. Nick just ignored the woman. 

“Yes, we are,” she said. “I hope we’re not too early.”

“I see from your reservation card that you’re a Sandy, too,” the woman said. “Isn’t that funny?”

“I go by Sandra,” she replied. Nick took their black Samsonite suitcase out of the trunk.

“Let me get that,” Sandy said, but Nick pulled the bag away from her.

“We’re fine,” he said.

Sandy walked them to the room, “a quiet, spacious suite,” she told them, in the back of the inn. “You two lovebirds let me know if you need anything,” she said, giggling, as she closed the door behind her.

The room was even smaller than their bedroom at home. A canopied queen bed with a frilly white comforter stood in the center, taking up most of the space. The only place to sit was a single club chair with frayed arms next to the window. In the corner was a tiny bathroom with a shower and a single sink.

“All this for only $89 a night?” Nick said, examining the tiny bar of Ivory soap, the sarcasm seeping through his raspy tone.

Sandra pushed the suitcase to the side of the bed. “We could have stayed at the Hilton in Hartford for one-fifty.”

Nick lay down on the comforter, not bothering to remove his shoes.

“She said there’s free coffee in the lobby,” Sandra said. “You want any?”

Nick shook his head. He pulled the chain on the tiny lamp on the side table beside the bed and blinked when the bulb lit up, like it was a big surprise.

Sandra picked up her book and walked back down the hall to the front entrance. She saw a young man with stringy black hair at the front desk. His thin face vaguely resembled Sandy’s—without the smile. 

“Is there coffee made?” she asked, looking around the lobby.

The young man pointed toward the table at the front of the dining room. Three other small tables were covered with starched white tablecloths, each with four place settings of blue and white china. She remembered the ad had said the room came with free breakfast.

Sandra half-filled a Styrofoam cup with hot water from the urn and dumped in a packet of Folger’s Instant. Just then, Sandy came out from the back of the dining room. 

“I see you found the coffee,” she said. “Is the room okay? Do you need any creamer?”

“It’s fine,” Sandra said. Sandra glanced at the tables and wondered how many other guests were staying there.

“First time in Huntsville?” the woman asked.

“I was here once when I was younger,” Sandra said. “With my mother.” She was surprised at how fluidly the lies came lately. First, the Tom and Susie story. Then, this one. 

“Oh, so you have family here?”

“Just a friend of my mother’s. Lydia, her name was.”

“That must have been quite some time ago,” Sandy said. “I’ve lived here twenty years and don’t remember anyone named Lydia.”

Sandra put down her cup and opened the book. She showed the red envelope to Sandy. “Do you know where this street is?”

“Coriander Lane,” she read. “Yeah, that’s the old Baker place. Allison Beale lives there.”

Sandra frowned. Allison. Not Lydia. “Do you know her?” she asked.

“Not well,” Sandy said. “Kind of an odd duck. Some sort of artist. She keeps to herself.”

“Is it far from here?”

Sandy laughed. “You’re in Huntsville, Connecticut, honey. Nothing is far from anything.” She pointed toward the parking lot. “It’s maybe a half mile down that road you drove up. On the left side.”

Sandra looked down at the envelope. There was no point in waiting until tomorrow. She thanked Sandy and headed out the front door. The chill in the late afternoon air made her shiver. She hadn’t brought her jacket but didn’t want to return to the room for it. Nick would ask too many questions. She tossed the rest of her coffee in the rosebush next to the front steps and headed down the road.

She found a rocky country lane just beyond a sharp bend in the road. She didn’t see any sign but assumed it must be Coriander Lane. She walked past two empty lots and came to a tiny white house with a short picket fence on the right side. The place badly needed painting, its weathered façade grayish from neglect, half a dozen pieces missing from the cedar shake roof. Sandra pushed open the gate and walked to the front door.

After she rang the doorbell for a third time, Sandra saw a woman’s face peering from the side window. The door opened slowly.

“May I help you?” the woman whispered.

Sandra could barely see her through the screen door. “Are you Lydia?”

“I’m Allison,” the woman said cooly. “What do you want?”

Sandra took out the red envelope from the book. “Are you the one who’s been sending cards to Mrs. Virginia Cutter for the last twenty years?”

The woman looked down at the envelope.

“Are you her?” Sandra said.

Still, the woman said nothing.

“Mrs. Cutter was my mother,” Sandra said. “I’ve probably written a dozen letters to this address telling you my mother is dead. Yet the cards keep coming. Every year.”

The woman stepped outside and pulled the front door shut. She was younger than Sandra first thought, her face smooth with only a few tiny blemishes and the beginnings of wrinkles around her eyes. She had thick auburn hair that bounced about in the afternoon breeze. She wore faded blue jeans, the front splattered with dried flecks of paint, and a white smock that looked like it belonged to a surgeon.

“Lydia was my mother,” Allison said.

“Where is she now?”

“She passed twenty-five years ago,” Allison said. “My mother loved Christmas. She said it was the only time of the year she felt good about herself. Before she died, she made me promise to keep sending her holiday cards to her friends.”

“But why?”

“She didn’t want to be forgotten, I suppose.” Allison shrugged. “So I just keep sending them. Probably a hundred a year.”

“But why would you send them to people you know don’t receive them?” Sandra said.

Allison offered a faint smile. “I get a couple of letters a year from people telling me whoever I’m sending the card to has passed away,” she said. “And many more come back undelivered. Addressee unknown. But a promise is a promise.”

Sandra remembered the thirty years of promises she made to Nick. I promise I won’t leave you. I promise we can try having another baby. I promise I won’t hit you anymore. All worthless. She couldn’t tell if Allison was an unusually dutiful daughter or a nut job.

“Twenty-five years is long enough to keep a promise, isn’t it?”

Allison gave her a funny look. “I suppose to some people, it is.”

Sandra looked down at the envelope. “Do you know how our mothers knew each other?”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t have a clue who half the people are. I just send them the cards.”

“Would you mind showing me the list?”

“Why?” Allison said.

“Maybe I’d recognize some of the names,” Sandra said.

Just then, the wind picked up, blowing Allison’s hair to the side. Sandra shivered a bit.

“Come inside,” Allison said, opening the door.

Sandra sat in the tiny parlor, her ass lopsided and uncomfortable against the lumpy divan. A few minutes later, Allison returned with a manila file folder in her hand.

“Here,” she said.

Sandra opened the file. Columns of names and addresses were neatly printed on the lined paper, now somewhat yellowed with age, its once-smooth pages creased and frayed. It was so much like her mother’s list. She scanned the names as she flipped through the ten pages. She wished she had her mother’s list to compare.

But there were two names she recognized.

Mrs. Virginia Cutter, her mother. And Althea Blakeley. Address 2175 East Fifth Street, Baltimore. Her second cousin. The one she’d screwed out of a house with only $167 worth of cellulose debris that Sandra had hired a handyman to clear. It had taken him less than an hour.

Sandra pointed at Althea’s name. “Did you know her?”

Allison looked at the name. “She’s one of them,” she said. “The dead ones.”

Sandra felt a cold wave pass over the back of her neck. Althea had been ten years younger than Sandra. “Are you sure?”

“She’s one of the ones I got a letter about,” Allison said. “A pretty angry letter, I remember, from her father. He said his daughter had been homeless and died on the streets. And why did I keep raising such bad memories? How was I to know?”

Homeless.

“But you keep sending the cards anyway?”

“Every year,” she said. Her face reddened.

Allison handed her the file. “I think it’s time to stop,” she said.

“I’m not sure I can,” the woman said, staring down at her mother’s list.

Sandra took hold of the woman’s hands. The thin skin was pasty white, blemished with small purple bruises.

“You’re hurting people,” she said. “Don’t you see that?”

A single tear ran down Allison’s left cheek.

“But if I stop,” she said, “she’ll be forgotten.”

Sandra walked back to the Blossom Creek Inn, her copy of Hawaii tucked under her left arm, the red envelope dangling between her fingers. A sudden breeze lifted the envelope from her hand as she stepped onto the front porch. Sandra turned and watched it as it blew down the driveway, landing in a clump of juniper bushes on the side of the road. She didn’t bother to retrieve it.

“Nice walk?” Sandy said, popping her head out the front door. “There’s a pretty decent diner down the street if you and your husband want dinner. They serve a mean meatloaf special on Saturdays.”

“Thank you,” Sandra said. Then she saw her jacket on the back seat of the car. She pulled the handle of the car door. It was unlocked. Goddam Nick had even left the keys in the change holder.

She couldn’t believe Nick was still asleep on the queen bed when she entered the room. That made it easier. No need to make up a story that Tom and Susie had been in an accident and she needed to drive home. Sandra grabbed her purse and tiptoed out of the room. As she closed the door, she heard one of Nick’s earsplitting snorts as he rolled over.

She wondered how angry he would be when he woke up and discovered she was gone. Leaving him at a cheap inn in a small town with no way to get home. Or would he care? Would he even remember she’d been there? Was she so easily forgotten?

She laughed out loud as she drove past the Blossom Creek Inn sign. She had been right. They weren’t going to make it to their fortieth anniversary.

By then, she would be in Hawaii.

Editor's Notes:

If I had to break this story down to one question, it would probably be: what is the full weight of a life?

One of the main reasons this stood out to us as a submission was in how the story builds upon a series of mirroring relationships. Specifically Sandra and her mother versus Lydia and Allison. Forgotten people and forgotten promises. Don's choice to use a Christmas card as the story's spine is quite fitting, because these objects should signify warmth and connection but instead reveal absence and the persistence of the unwanted.

Which is probably why the most cutting line in this story upon reflection is Sandy's statement that she never knew someone named Lydia, even in this small of a town. It's no wonder Allison does what she does.

And then there's Nick, a man rendered almost entirely through habits (coffee slurping, nostril picking, snoring). The story barely needs to tell us the marriage is loveless, it just has to describe him. What's more interesting is what we learn about Sandra, how she lies casually and with pleasure. That she married for complicated reasons and stayed for complicated ones, and she's been rehearsing her departure for years without knowing it. The repeated phrase "if you last that long" (said only internally) functions like a pressure gauge the reader gets to watch as it rises throughout the narrative.

The Allison scene is of course where the story pivots and crystallizes and becomes what it needs to be. Allison is Sandra's dark mirror. Someone also trapped by a dead mother's expectations, also performing a duty that has curdled into something harmful. Sandra's question "Twenty-five years is long enough to keep a promise, isn't it?" is directed at herself as much as Allison, and Allison's answer—"I suppose to some people, it is"—is the story's thematic core. What really makes it tick.

Allison's revelation about Althea lands with real force because of the earlier setup. Sandra cheated Althea out of a house with a lie about termite damage, and Althea died homeless. And what's great is that the story doesn't editorialize this. It just puts those two facts next to each other and lets the reader process the discomfort. Sandra doesn't confess or apologize. She just absorbs the information and moves on.

The ending is earned but not entirely clean, which is actually to the story's credit. Sandra driving away while Nick snores is satisfying as a moment of liberation, but the story is smart enough to leave the moral weight unresolved. She's escaping a bad marriage, which is good. She also cheated her drug-addicted cousin out of an inheritance that might have changed her life, and that cousin died on the streets. The final image of Hawaii connects back to the Michener novel, the preprinted vacation cards people send, and the dream of escape. It's hopeful and a little ironic at the same time.—Jon Negroni

Don J. Rath holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. A retired finance executive, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing on themes of identity, race, family, and LGBTQ+ experience. His work has been published in Musepaper, Hypnopomp, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, Blood and Bourbon, Twelve Winters Journal, Barren Magazine, Fiery Scribe Review, LitBreak, and Roi Faineant. He is also a frequent contributor to the Southern Review of Books. His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (2023) and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst.

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