The letter he never sent loved her for forty years from a drawer

On the third day of sorting through my father's belongings, my hand found a letter with no stamp on it in the bottom drawer of his desk.

The envelope had gone yellow and brittle. The recipient was my mother, at her family's old address — a village that no longer exists on any map. The envelope had never been sealed. I hesitated, then took out the paper. The handwriting was my father's, much younger than the hand I knew from his later years, the strokes pressed hard, and in a few places the ink had bled, as though the page had been wet.

He wrote it in the autumn of 1984. That year my father was on a construction site in the north, and my mother was staying with her parents, pregnant with my sister.

"Xiulan. Seeing your handwriting is like seeing your face. The food on site is passable, but the nights are cold, and I keep thinking of how cold your hands and feet get. I told you to sleep first and you insisted on waiting for my letter. The site issued new cotton gloves. I kept a pair back for you."

There were four pages. He wrote about the first full-attendance bonus he'd ever been paid. He wrote about how a man from his home county taught him to pickle snow greens. He wrote about dreaming of the birth, and whether the baby would be a boy or a girl — "even if the doctor says it's a girl I'll be glad. A girl would look like you, and you're good-looking." At the end he wrote: "Once I'm settled I'll send for you. By the time this letter reaches you, I should be nearly there myself."

But my mother never received that letter.

I took it to her. She put on her reading glasses and read it one character at a time, very slowly. When she finished she smoothed the paper flat and said, "He never told me he'd written it. That autumn I didn't get a single letter. I thought he was busy."

We pieced the rest together afterwards. The letter missed the mail lorry. My father's crew was moved at short notice, and the letter was pressed inside his luggage for months. By the time he remembered it, the address had changed and he was nearly home himself. So it went into the drawer, and lay there for forty years. He had probably grown used to it being there, the way you grow used to a thing that has never been said.

My mother put it in the cabinet beside her bed. She didn't cry. That evening she wiped down his old desk, and she cleaned the seams of the drawers too, with a cloth wrapped around a toothpick.

Some love is read aloud forty years late, and not one word of it has expired.

I think often about how that generation expressed love. They never said the word. Not once in a lifetime. Their love was the figure on a money order, the sweets carried home at New Year, the pair of cotton gloves that had been "kept back." The deepest things they wrote down, and then were too shy to post.

Near the end, the letter has a line in smaller characters, the strokes lighter than the rest, as though it had been added after a long hesitation. "Xiulan, I'm not much of a letter writer, so bear with me. One thing is certain — every cent I earn, half of it is yours."

I read that line aloud to my mother while she was trimming vegetables. Her hands stopped for a moment, then went on, and after a long while she said, "As long as he knew."

Later I asked her whether missing the letter counted as a regret. She thought about it and said no. "That man — the things he couldn't say, he did. In forty years I never went a meal hungry, you children never went without tuition, and whenever he came back from a trip there was always something in his bag for me. The letter was late. The man wasn't." She paused, then added, "It's your generation. You can say it. You can't do it."

My face burned. She was right. Typing out I love you and sending it takes a second. Carrying one sentence in your heart for forty years, until somebody finally opens the drawer and finds it — very few of us could manage that.