There’s just one thing I can’t manage to understand. “But why does Dad have to leave? Why would he do that?”

“That’s not for me to answer. But I’ll tell you one thing: he can’t answer if you won’t listen. Stomping back and forth down the street doesn’t look like you’ve given him much of a chance if you ask me. Talk to him.”

“Can I ask you another question?”

“Shoot.”

“What about my letters?” I ask. “The ones I’ve sent you. How come you never responded?”

She stands up, stretching so hard a few bones creak and pop.

All at once I feel very foolish. Of course she doesn’t have time to answer every single letter.

I watch as she walks into the kitchen and opens the oven, where she keeps her important papers, digging around for a minute until she comes up with a beige folder. She walks back over to where I’m sitting in the living room and drops the folder on my lap. Written on the tab in a gentle cursive, it says, The Sweet Pea Files.

I open the folder and there they are. Each letter I’ve written to Miss Flora Mae. A rush of embarrassment makes me clam up, and I think I’d rather just take these letters and bury them in my backyard next to my pet hamster, Sir Waffles (RIP, Sir Waffles).

“So I guess you don’t respond to every letter?”

She sighs. “Well, there are two answers to that question. The first is: kid, I get a lot of letters. There aren’t enough hours in a day to answer ’em all. For a town this small, there are certainly a lot of people looking for a user’s manual to this thing called life. And, ya know, to be perfectly honest, if you just read my responses and think for a little while, I bet you could find that I’ve already answered all your questions. It’s just that someone else was doing the asking.”

“And what’s your other answer?”

She smirks. “My second answer is that sometimes you’ve just gotta live through life without any shortcuts. Sometimes the only way you can figure out which way is up is to swim to the surface all on your own. It stinks, but it’s true. And sometimes people answer their own questions in their letters. Writing can help suss things out, but sometimes we don’t see the answer because it’s not the one we’d hoped for.”

I sigh so hard my lips sound like a motorboat. That’s what Mom would call some hard truth. But I bet it’s true for everyone. Even Mrs. Young or Cliff VanWarren or Miss Flora Mae herself.

“So that’s why you didn’t respond to my letters?”

“Mostly,” she says. “Plus, I knew they were from you, and I don’t have any kind of code of ethics for advice columnists, but something about responding to people I know when I have more details about them than their letters lets on feels like cheating.”