There were thirty-seven unopened letters fastened with a red rubber band and propped behind my jewelry box. All from my mother. Now that I was at the University of Florida, more than a day’s drive from my parents, I received a letter almost every other day unless a hitch in the postal service delayed the arrival of the sky-blue stationery in a sky-blue envelope. The first week I opened each one, imagining Mother’s voice rising from the page, caught in the envelope until I unsealed it, sliding the blade of the silver opener my parents gave me for graduation under the top fold. I never ripped the paper, leaving clean edges as Mother would have wanted, would have expected for it was the ladylike way of receiving mail that Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt recommended. My mother thought life was etched in behavior defined by the past and for that reason she was quite resistant to my going to a university where curfews were ignored and girls had no guiding hand except perhaps that of a sorority sister finding her own way in the dark.

Mother wrote the way she talked, peppering her words with Dorothy Parker.  Boys seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses or A girl needs two things: she must be pretty and ruthless or Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

She used to make me cry.

“Don’t be a baby,” she’d say.

I learned to hold back tears until I was by myself.

The university was pure freedom except for her letters. Once Mother surprised me when she drove down with Dad who was troubleshooting an account at Gainesville Creek Mills. It was my first year, and I was still in Trussler Dorm with Lucy. Sitting at my desk in cutoffs, a UF T-shirt, and cat eye glasses, highlighting almost every sentence in The Great Gatsby, I heard someone at the door. “Maggie, are you there?” I recognized that Southern girlishness, anxious to cross the threshold and find out what her daughter was really doing.

“Just a minute,” I said, sticking the Reese’s cups and ashtray in the drawer. My mother, as usual, was put together—green A-line dress with matching sweater and sling-back pumps. “What a surprise,” I said, shoving my books off the bed and swallowing hard. “Why didn’t you call?”

“Can’t a mother drop in, see what her daughter’s up to?” she said, sitting down in the desk chair.

“Oh sure. Just studying for a test,” I said. Glaring.

Mother’s head rotated slowly past the chaos of my room to the dresser. She stared at the bundle of unopened letters. I knew she knew, and I wanted to crawl under the quilt, pretend this moment never happened. Maybe I’d wake up, and she’d be gone.

“Do you ever read them?” she asked.

I looked past her at the door.

“Answer me.”

I started playing with my hair, rolling it around my finger until the words formed under my breath. “Not much anymore.”

“Speak up, Maggie.”

I felt something different, a force, a surge, same as the time Tony patted my butt going up the stairs in twelfth grade. I turned and slapped him, my hand stinging.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

I shrugged like I did when showing my indifference to her choice of TV programs.

Mother picked up the letters and stuffed them in her purse. She never turned around, heels clicking further and further into the afternoon until the room filled again with stillness. I opened the drawer and retrieved the ashtray.

The sound of a match ignited a welcome violation.