by Gord Deyo

The letter was folded into quarters, wrapped in a strip of wax paper, and tucked between two blocks of ice at the bottom of the crate like it had been hidden by someone who understood cold.

Marta almost didn’t see it. She was moving fast. It was nearly eleven, her hands were numb, and the fish smell had long since moved past her nose and into the back of her skull where it lived now, permanent as a squatter. She stacked the empty crates against the back wall of the stall, the way she did every Thursday, every Friday, and every Saturday for four years. She was thinking about the streetcar and the quiet of her one-bedroom on Dundas.

She was not thinking about letters.

Under the bare bulb at the back of the stall, she peeled away the wax paper. No stamp. No address or name. The handwriting was small and careful.

I know I have no right to send this. I also know you won’t expect it. That’s why I’m sending it this way, because I’m a coward, and because I wasn’t sure you’d read it if it came to your door.

Marta looked up. The market was almost empty. A man two stalls down was coiling an extension cord around his forearm, elbow to thumb, elbow to thumb, with the patience of someone who had done it a thousand times. An enormous, orange cat she recognized, belonging to no one, sat on an overturned milk crate watching her.

She read on.

The letter ran four pages, written small on both sides. It was from a man named Paul to a woman he called only C. The kind of letter, under normal circumstances, nobody had any business reading. Marta read it twice.

By the second read she understood that Paul had last seen C in the spring of 1987, on the corner of Augusta and Baldwin, in the middle of a bad argument about something the letter never named. That he had found her name in an online directory six months ago and had driven past her building on Palmerston twice without stopping. That he was sick now, not urgently, but enough to start sorting through what he had left unfinished.

Near the end he wrote: I don’t want anything from you. I’m not asking you to call. I’m not asking you to forgive me, though I won’t pretend I wouldn’t be grateful. I just wanted you to know that it mattered. What we were. I wanted someone in the world to know I knew that.

He signed it Paul, and below that he’d written a phone number.

Marta folded the pages back along their creases.

She could throw it away. That was the clean answer. It wasn’t her letter. It wasn’t her history. She had her own, stacked up neatly in a one-bedroom with a view of the alley bins. She knew how much room old things could take up when you let them sit long enough.

Three winters ago, a man she’d once lived with mailed her a Christmas card with no return address. Inside was one sentence: I was not good to you, and I know that now. She tore it into pieces over the sink. For a week afterward she kept finding scraps of it under the radiator, in a boot, caught in the shower curtain. Destruction, it turned out, was just another way of keeping something.

The orange cat dropped off the crate and disappeared into the dark between the stalls.

Marta put the letter in her coat pocket.

She didn’t know a woman named C on Palmerston. She didn’t know anyone named Paul. But Kensington was small the way old neighborhoods are small, not in size, but in how often lives touched. She knew people who knew people. And the letter had a phone number at the bottom.

She turned off the bulb, pulled down the gate, and locked it.

Augusta Avenue was quiet. The summer smell of the market, all that sweet rot and brine, hung in the warm dark like it always did. Marta started south through the market towards the Dundas streetcar stop, the folded pages pressed flat against her palm.

At the corner, under the streetlamp, she stopped and took out her phone.

The number was local.

She stared at it for a while, then entered it, and pressed call.

It rang four times.

When the man answered, his voice was thin and cautious. “Hello?”

Marta almost hung up. Instead she said, “I’m calling about a letter I found in a crate. It’s to someone named C. Signed Paul.”

Silence. Then, “Who is this?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

A longer silence followed. In the distance she heard the streetcar grinding along Dundas.

He asked, “Did she get it?”

“No.”

He let out a breath that sounded like it hurt. “Then throw it away.”

Marta looked down at the envelope in her hand. “Why?”

“Because if I couldn’t give it to her properly all those years ago, I don’t get to do it badly now.”

The streetcar bell clanged once up the block.

Marta thought of the card in pieces under her radiator. Thought of all the ways people arrived late and still wanted credit for arriving.

“You don’t get to decide that either,” she said.

He said nothing.

The streetcar slowed to a stop, light spilling onto the sidewalk, doors shuddering open. People got on. People got off. The streetcar idled at the curb.

Marta ended the call.

She turned away from the open streetcar doors and started walking back towards the market, where somebody would know somebody on Palmerston, and where by morning she might know where the letter belonged.