The Letters No One Signed
Upmarket Literary Fiction with Speculative Elements | 77,000 words
Setting: Sumner County, TN
Delia Thomas has lost her job, her marriage, and her mother in the same year. Nine months later, she returns to the four-generation Tennessee farmhouse she fled at eighteen, determined to sell it, clear out the rooms, and leave again.
Then the dead start asking her to write letters.
The first is a man Delia once loved, gone for years, asking her to write to the son he left behind. The letter contains a detail Delia could not possibly know. Soon others begin finding her too, carrying apologies, secrets, unfinished truths, and requests that range from tender to cruel. Delia rents a post office box, becomes an unlikely go-between, and learns quickly that death does not make anyone wiser, kinder, or more deserving of the last word.
As the letters move through the living, old wounds shift and family stories begin to loosen. Delia also starts to understand that what is happening to her is not entirely new. The women in her family have always had a complicated relationship with the impossible.
But the one person Delia wants most never comes.
Her mother’s silence becomes the question beneath every letter Delia writes. Was Annabelle afraid at the end? Did Delia’s leaving matter as much as she has always believed? And if the dead come because something is unfinished, what does it mean when the person you are waiting for has nothing left to say?
The Letters No One Signed is upmarket fiction with speculative elements about family grief, inherited silence, and the stories we build around the people we love when they are no longer here to correct us.
The first dead person who asked me for a favor was a man I’d slept with, which, if you knew my history with men, was not the most surprising thing about the situation. The most surprising thing was that he was holding a cantaloupe.
But I’ll get to Davis.
Before Davis, before the letters, before I became a woman who rented a post office box so the living could write back to people who were already dead, there was a house I was trying to sell.
The house was beautiful from the road. Everyone said so. It sat back from the county blacktop at the end of a gravel drive, white clapboard with green shutters Mom repainted every four years whether they needed it or not, a deep porch that wrapped two sides, and old shade trees in the front yard that created dappled shadow.
From thirty feet, it looked like something a person would be lucky to inherit.
From ten feet, you could see the soft places in the porch boards.
From inside, you could see everything else.
I stood in the front hall with a spiral notebook balanced against my forearm and a pen I’d lifted from the dentist’s office and started my list.
I wrote baseboards because the baseboards hadn’t been painted since the Clinton administration and, in two places, had begun to separate from the wall in a way that looked less like age and more like surrender.
Under that, upstairs bath faucet.
Then front porch rail.
Then pantry smell?
The question mark was important. Some smells in old houses could be corrected with vinegar, baking soda, and spiritual denial. Others required men with respirators and strong stomachs.
The farmhouse had four bedrooms, two full baths, one half bath that had never earned the name, a dining room nobody had dined in since Easter of 2009, and a back staircase narrow enough to suggest that everyone in my family had once been either thinner or more optimistic. It sat on a hundred and twenty-five acres that had been called pretty by people who didn’t have to mow them, bush-hog them, fence them, insure them, or pay tax on them.
The house had been my great-grandmother Osha’s first, then my grandmother Ida’s, then my mother Annabelle’s, and now, technically, mine.
Technically was doing a lot of work.
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