Summer of Unsent Letters

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June Morales drove the town like she was remembering it from a distance, as if the map of Main Street had been kept folded in her pocket and only now unfurled. The gulls were loud in the heat, the harbor slowed to an easy shimmer, and the hardware store with its peeling aqua paint still sat where Samuel had always parked his old truck. She could predict the way the bell above the door of her father’s shop would jangle whenever someone pushed in; she could picture her father’s hands, darkened by nails and grease but careful when he tied change into paper and handed it over. It was a neat, stubborn sort of town: built of decks and stubborn people and stories you learned to keep in your head so they didn’t blow into the sea.

She had taken one suitcase and her sketchbox. The acceptance letter for the art program sat unfolded in the pocket of her jeans like a promise she had not yet learned to trust. Samuel had insisted she bring only what she could carry; he’d said the house couldn’t be left full of old things no one would claim. “We need to clear it,” he had told her on the phone, the linen of his voice tightened with what he called sense. June understood sense. She could understand the arithmetic of upkeep, the way roofs leaked and taxes chipped away at memory. But what he called sense felt, to her, like a bargain that might take the shape of absence.

Grandma Lidia’s house smelled like lemon oil and dust and something sweeter underneath—sewing thread and the faint, honest ghost of cinnamon. It leaned into the lane like a woman holding a lot of knitting: sagging porch, shutters that never quite closed all the way. Inside, every shelf was a small museum of decisions: jars lined by size, a row of chipped teacups, stacks of postcards tied with faded ribbon, a shelf of paperbacks with dog‑eared corners. June walked with the slow reverence of someone combing a grave looking for fingerprints.

She climbed the narrow stairs to the attic with flashlight and dusty hands, each step complaining underfoot. Light pooled through the small square window, making the attic look like an amphitheater for things that had been waiting. Trunks breathed in the corners; a hatbox stared out like a closed eye. There were quilts folded in careful thirds and old sweaters that still smelled like lavender and evenings. June set her sketchbox down and ran her fingers along the top of a trunk until she found a small tin tucked under a moth‑eaten shawl. It was the sort of tin that used to hold tea, painted with tiny roses, its clasp rimmed in rust. It was, unexpectedly, locked.