Norma sat in the cold Buick and waited. She had been a mother and a grandmother long enough to know when a person needed to say something and could not be hurried.
Arlene took a long breath.
"Mama made me do it," she said.
It came out slowly, in pieces, the way old things do.
In August of 1968, their mother had seen a letter from Jim on the kitchen table. Norma had left it open. In it, Jim had written that when he got out of the Army, he wanted to take her out to Oregon, where he had a cousin with a logging job, and they could start fresh away from Indiana.
Their mother had read it and gone white. Their father had just had his first heart attack. Norma was the one who did the baking that kept the family going, selling pies to the diner in town and at the fair. Arlene was already married and living in Lafayette.
"She said if you went to Oregon, it would kill Daddy," Arlene said. "She said Jim Calloway was going to take you two thousand miles away and we'd never see you again. She cried for two days."
"So you took my letters."
"She asked me to hold them back for a month. Just a month, she said, until Daddy was stronger, and you could think straight." Arlene's voice cracked. "And then a month became two. And then his mother told the whole church he was marrying that girl in Oregon, and I thought, well. It doesn't matter now."
Norma looked out the windshield at the gray sky over the fairgrounds.
"What did you do with them?"
Arlene did not answer.
"Arlene. Did you burn them?"
"No." Her sister wiped her face with the back of her glove. "I couldn't. I tried. I kept them in a shoebox. I told myself I'd give them to you someday." She looked at Norma for the first time. "I've moved that shoebox to four different houses, Norma. It's in my hall closet. On the top shelf, behind the Christmas lights."
Norma did not say anything for a long time.
She thought about her mother, who had died in 1994, still baking pies at eighty. She thought about her father, who had lived nineteen more years after that heart attack and had walked Norma down the aisle to Dale. She thought about Dale, who had been a good man and a good husband and had never once known any of this.
She thought about what her life would have been, in Oregon, with a logging cousin and Jim Calloway.
She could not see it. She did not try very hard.
"I'm not going to forgive you today," she said finally. "I want you to know that. I might tomorrow. Not today."
"That's fair," Arlene whispered.
"But I'd like the shoebox," Norma said. "Tonight."
Arlene brought it to the farmhouse at seven, wrapped in a grocery bag against the snow. She set it on the kitchen table without a word and left.
Norma made a pot of coffee. Then she called Jim Calloway.
He came at eight, still in his barn coat, and sat down across from her at the table. He looked at the shoebox. It was an old Buster Brown box, faded orange, held shut with a rubber band so old it had gone brittle.
"Do you want me to leave while you read them?" he asked.
"No," Norma said. "I want you to stay. They're yours too."
She took the rubber band off. It snapped in her fingers.
There were fourteen letters in the box. Ten were from Jim, in his square, careful handwriting, postmarked Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Lewis, Washington. The last one was dated November 11, 1968. Four were from Norma, addressed to Pvt. James Calloway, never sent.
She read the last one from him out loud, because she could not read it silently.
He wrote that he had not heard from her in two months. He wrote that he understood if she had changed her mind. He wrote that a girl named Patricia from Salem had been kind to him at the USO, and that he did not know what to do, but that if Norma wrote back, even one line, he would be on the next bus to Indiana.
Norma put the letter down.
Jim was looking at his hands on the table.
"Patricia was a good woman," he said quietly. "We were married fifty-six years. I'm not sorry for a day of it. I want you to know that."
"I'm not sorry for Dale, either."
"I know you're not." He looked up. "But I always wondered."
"So did I," Norma said.
The next summer, at the Tippecanoe Bend county fair, Norma Fultz won her thirty-second blue ribbon for sugar cream pie.
Arlene ran the jam table beside her, the same as always. They had not talked about the shoebox since Christmas. Norma had forgiven her in February, on a Tuesday, over the phone, for no particular reason. Arlene had cried for twenty minutes.
On the last night of the fair, after the ribbons were handed out, Jim Calloway came to the pie table at closing time. He was wearing a clean shirt and a new straw hat.
"Ferris wheel's still running," he said.
Norma looked at him. She looked at the Ferris wheel, turning slow and lit up against the August dark, on the same lot on the north side of the fairgrounds where it had stood since 1967.
Then she took off her apron, folded it into a neat square, and handed it to her sister.
"Watch my pies," she said.