The post office in Delaney Falls opened at eight-thirty, and for twenty-one years, Ruth Abernathy was there by eight-forty on Wednesdays. The clerks changed. The carpet changed twice. Ruth kept coming, always with one envelope, always addressed to the same box number three rows from the window — box 114, which she had rented the same week her granddaughter was born and had renewed, without ever once explaining why, every year since.
The first letter was written in a hospital parking lot, on the back of a parking receipt, because Ruth hadn't planned to write anything at all. She had gone out to the car to cry where nobody could see her doing it. Six pounds, eleven ounces. A whole person, brand new, with fingernails.
Dear Nora,
You are four hours old and you have your mother's chin, which means you'll be stubborn, which I'm glad about. I don't know what to say to you yet. I'll get better at this.
— Grandma, Wednesday
She didn't get better at it, exactly. That was the strange part. Ruth was not a writer. Her letters never became wise. Over two decades they stayed almost aggressively ordinary — the tomatoes came in early, the Hendersons sold their boat, the church roof was leaking again and Father Michael had opinions about it. Half of them read like a woman talking to herself in a kitchen.
Nora grew up two states away, which in the beginning felt like an ocean and later, after everyone had smartphones, felt like nothing at all. She saw her grandmother at Christmas and for two weeks each August. She knew Ruth as a person who made an excellent pie crust, could not work a television remote, and asked the same four questions about school every single time.
What Nora did not know was that on the Wednesday she broke her arm falling off the Petersons' fence, her grandmother wrote a letter about being scared. That on the Wednesday after Nora's father moved out, Ruth wrote three pages and mailed all three. That on an ordinary Wednesday in March when nothing at all had happened, Ruth wrote:
Nothing to report today, which I've decided is its own kind of report. Your grandfather is asleep in the chair with the paper on his face. The furnace is making that noise again. I keep thinking that someday you'll read all of these at once and think what a small life this was.
I hope you'll understand that it didn't feel small from in here.
— Grandma, Wednesday
There were 1,094 of them by the end. Ruth counted once, around year fifteen, and then stopped counting because the number frightened her a little.
The morning of Nora's twenty-first birthday, the family did brunch at a place with too many ferns. There were cards. There was a scarf from an aunt. And near the end, when Nora was full and half-listening and ready to go, her grandmother slid a small envelope across the tablecloth.
Inside was a key. Small, brass, dulled at the edges the way a thing gets when it has been carried in a purse for two decades.
"It's a post office box," Ruth said. "In Delaney Falls. Box one-fourteen." She was folding her napkin very precisely, the way people do when they need something to look at. "It's yours. It's been yours."
Nora drove out that afternoon, mostly out of politeness. She expected a savings bond.
The box door swung open on a wall of paper. Envelopes packed edge to edge, so many that the top ones had gone soft and curled from the pressure, all of them in the same slanted hand, all of them addressed to Miss Nora Abernathy, a person who had been, on the day the first one was written, four hours old.
The clerk had to bring her a mail crate. Then a second one.
She sat down on the floor of the post office lobby, which you are not supposed to do, and nobody said a word to her about it. She opened the one from the bottom first — the parking receipt, the fingernails, I'll get better at this — and read it eleven times before she could see well enough to read the next one.
She called from the car. Her grandmother picked up on the second ring, the way she always did.
"Grandma." It came out wrecked. "Why Wednesdays?"
There was a pause on the line, and the small sound of a woman sitting down.
"Well," Ruth said. "Wednesday was always the slowest day. Your grandfather worked late, the house got quiet, and I found I didn't much care for the quiet." She laughed a little, embarrassed. "So I gave myself somebody to talk to."
"You wrote me a thousand letters."
"I wrote myself a thousand Wednesdays," her grandmother said. "You just happened to be who I wrote them to."
Ruth Abernathy lived another nineteen years, which surprised everybody including Ruth. She kept writing. Nora, who by then had a daughter of her own, drove out to Delaney Falls every few months to empty the box, and always sat in the car in the lot to read the newest one before starting the engine.
She has box 116 now, three rows from the window. Nobody in her family knows about it yet.
She writes on Wednesdays.
The Wednesday Letters is an original work of fiction. Ruth and Nora Abernathy are invented characters, and Delaney Falls is an invented town — though we suspect a few readers will recognize somebody in them anyway.