Page 23 of Signed, Sealed, and Smitten
“Is that what you’re doing in the cottage?” she asks. “Making history?”
“Recontextualizing it,” I say. “I’m on a deadline for a book. Or at least that’s what I tell people as an excuse for wandering around in flip-flops and not brushing my hair. You can excusealmost anything lazy you do if you tell people you’re on a book deadline.”
“Noted. Almost makes me want to write a book.”
“Are you changing the subject? Do you want me to pretend the letter doesn’t exist?”
She eyes it. “It feels weird because Ididsee this with a stamp and postmark before.”
“There’s no right or wrong answer here. I don’t see how it could be the same letter, and you don’t know who it’s for. But you won’t find out unless you open it. And it looks old enough that at this point, the sender and the recipient probably both know it never arrived and connected anyway.”
“What if itwasimportant, and because Smitten Kitten never saw it, there was a falling out that never got corrected?”
I tear my eyes away from her lipstick. (Whatisthat color?) “It’s possible. All I can tell you is that with an unstamped letter that looks that old, I’d open it in a heartbeat.”
She taps it a couple more times, then with a decisive nod, she pulls scissors from the desk and carefully cuts across the shorter end of the envelope before tipping it to let the letter slide out.
It’s a few pages of beige (or yellowed?) lined stationery, folded in thirds. I can tell with a glance that the paper itself is in good condition. Still, Phoebe doesn’t touch it.
She purses her lips.
“You want gloves,” I guess.
“I do.”
“Butler’s pantry. Give me a second.” Grandad always kept lint-free cotton gloves around. Contrary to what a lot of movies show, the older the document is, the better it is to handle it with clean, dry hands. Gloves increase the chance of accidentally tearing fragile paper. But in the case of old photographs, books with metal or ivory parts, or any time youcan’t be sure what to expect when you open a sealed envelope, gloves are the smart play to protect against a potential hazard, like mold.
“Second cabinet, third drawer down,” I say when I return and hand them to Phoebe a minute later. “He also had a few other stashes around the house.”
Phoebe smiles. “Sounds like Foster. Impulsive enough to know he might get the urge to handle old items, smart enough to keep gloves in every room when he did.”
“You really did know him,” I say as she pulls on the gloves. It might be one of the things I like best about her—that I’ll never have to explain the Foster Martin experience to her. She gets it.
“I understood him,” she says. “We understood each other. I never had to defend museum work as a career.”
“Let me guess: everyone wants to know why you aren’t a lawyer or a computer programmer?”
She shoots me a wry smile. “You get that a lot too, huh?”
“And also finance. That one bugs me. I resent the implication that I have finance bro energy.”
She flicks a glance at me before picking up the letter. “You don’t have finance bro energy.”
Something about her sentence implies abut, and I want to know what it is. “But I have some kind of bro energy?”
She keeps her eyes on the letter. “Don’t we all have some type of energy?”
“Tell me,” I say. “What’s mine?”
“Oh, you know.” She says this in a vague way that I already know is not very Phoebe-esque.
“I don’t.” I do, but I want to hear her take.
She gives me a look that saysI see your game, and I’m not playing.This only makes the game more fun.
“Try one of those online personality tests,” she suggests. “Meanwhile, I’ve got some clues now, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.”
“Context clues in old letters? Sounds boring but you’d probably better tell me anyway.”
