Excerpt: Cards and Letters

It was the following week that the cards started arriving. A trickle at first, then a torrent. Cards and letters from people she didn’t know, had never heard of were sending her cards of condolence, and letters of sympathy. One person, she forgot who, had sent a small folder with a family tree in it, denoting her place in the family.
On her father’s side, that is.
Which really struck her harder than she ever thought it would. For all the anger over the years directed at her father, she never really considered “that side” of her family as her family. They were nameless, faceless and out of sight. For all she knew, she could have stood in line behind them at the K-Mart on the south end of town. She didn’t think it likely, because from what she knew and had been confirmed in the deluge of Hallmark angst, was that nobody from The Bastard’s side of the family lived anywhere near Rollins. Except for his wife (widow?), that is. They all lived out of state, which is someplace she had never been. Except for the one Christmas holiday The Bastard had taken her to visit her Grandparents (Grandpa Kelley and Grammie Marsha) in Pennsylvania, she hadn’t left the state.
She got a card from them, of course. And her Aunt Trish who she hadn’t seen in years. She was the one who tried contacting her through MySpace, and she blew off. She regretted that, but was too ashamed to try and do anything about it. There were more cards and letters from family, and from other people who knew her father. It all got to be a bit much for her.
It also made her wonder, for just a moment, why she didn’t get anything like this from her family when she got the news. No card, nothing. Just the news, and a hug and some words about how he won’t be around to bother her anymore.
True, she said she hated getting the cards and letters from him that he sent sporadically, but all of them, unread though they may be, were all carefully stored in a photo box she’d bought at Wal-Mart for it years ago. She took it down and opened it up when she got the news, looking at the envelopes. She arranged them all in chronological order, according to post mark. Funny, she hadn’t noticed that he’d sent a few from Rollins. She wondered if he mailed them from the post office downtown or from a curbside mailbox.