The old man never had visitors at the nursing home. Just one habit: mailing letters every Saturday. One day, I broke the rules and read one. It took me to a woman who wasn’t a stranger after all.
I had been working in a nursing home for five years. I loved my job. Truly. There was something special about helping elderly people.
We played chess, sang songs from their youth, and sometimes had little picnics in the garden with old quilts and plastic cups of lemonade.
Among the residents was one particular man everyone called Eliot. Just Eliot. Never any mention of his second name. He hated that.
“Add ‘mister’ one more time and I’ll start charging you rent for every syllable.”
We became friends almost immediately. Eliot was sharp-tongued, always ready with a remark.
“Blue stockings today, Jane? That’s bad luck.”
“If it weren’t for you, this place would be unbearable.”
No one ever visited him. Ever. I asked him once, maybe twice… alright, maybe a dozen times over the years:
“Eliot, do you have no family at all?”
“None. Never did. It’s just me.”
“What about friends?”
He chuckled, the kind of bitter laugh.
“Oh, darling… friends vanish one by one each year. And then, once you’re inconvenient, they all go at once.”
But the thing that intrigued me most about him was the letters.
Every Saturday, precisely at nine, he sat at his desk, and wrote slowly, in silence as if praying. Then he sealed it in an envelope, wrote something on the front, and set it down on the windowsill.
“Remind me about the mailbox later, Jane. I have to drop it in myself. Personally.”
“I could mail it for you, you know.”
“This is important. Please don’t ask again.”
So I didn’t. But… I’m a woman. Curiosity lives in my bones. His mailbox remained painfully empty, week after week. And one morning, I just couldn’t help myself.
When Eliot left the room and the letter sat alone on the sill, I swapped it with an identical envelope. My hands were shaking. But I did it.
For the first time in two years, I finally knew the name and address.
“To E.H. Forever your friend, Eliot.”
E.H.? That name… it stirred something. Familiar.
The address was a small town about an hour and a half away. I knew then and there — I had to go.
Maybe I could find someone who still remembered him. Someone who might finally write back.
***
The entire morning, I walked around with that letter burning a hole in my pocket.
I couldn’t focus on anything. So when the weekends came, I stuffed the letter into my bag and slipped out like a teenager sneaking out past curfew.
