I make a mental note of the matchbook, the cards, and their order as I lay it at the bottom of the bin and cover it with heaps of colorful envelopes, arranging the papers on top the way I found them. I push the bin under the bed and frown. I don’t like knowing Moony was writing her. I feel betrayed somehow, left in the dark. This secret correspondence I never knew about means what exactly?

There are so many things you don’t know.

I feel like a chump, like Moony and my mom had some arrangement I wasn’t privy to. Like they still do.

We spoke.

What else don’t I know? The Halloween card floats through my mind.

I wouldn’t call the letters loving or affectionate. I wouldn’t even call them friendly. But there is a level of respect present between the lines that I can’t ignore. Moony did not hate my mother. Some part of her still cared. She wanted her to know I was all right. She wanted her to listen. To what isn’t clear. A warning of some kind.

I feel childish in light of this newly revealed sentiment between them. Like I alone have been carrying a grudge I thought we shared all this time. There’s something so bizarre about it all. The hokey greeting cards…Why not just a slip of paper in an envelope? I remember those cards. Moony would get them in the mail and save them. I never knew why; she wasn’t the sentimental type. I guess I thought she liked the pictures. The cuteness of the images is out of place with the fastidiousness of her words. The blank interiors are haunting. Even when she wrote, she wouldn’t write on the card but on a piece of paper folded inside.

What words was she holding space for that she couldn’t bring herself to say?

Moony was my special name for my grandmother. No one else called her that. Her face was round and plain—she wore very little makeup. And her white hair was smoothed perfectly around it, not a strand out of place. I didn’t call her Maw-maw or Nana or any of those other grandmother names. I called her Grandma Moony at first, and then just Moony. I think she liked it. I’m pretty sure she did, but I don’t really know. Because like so many other things in Moony’s life, she never talked about it. She never said one way or another. She held her feelings down until they went still, the way you drown an animal.