The coffee maker is not broken. It just needs to be spoken to. Good morning, I say, and it warms. He is the same.
     He will tell you he doesn't care what's for dinner. He does. He wants the thing his mother made but cannot name. Something with cream. Something that disappears on the tongue like childhood. Keep guessing. You will never get it right. That's not the point. The point is the guessing.
     The children will feel like yours. They are not. They belong to the house. They will test you the way water tests a crack in the foundation—slowly, then all at once. Let them. They have lost enough mothers.
     When he cries, do not hold him. He wants to be held, but will hate you for it. Sit nearby. Say nothing. Let him come to you like a stray cat who has forgotten he was ever domesticated. This can take hours. This can take years. Once, it took a whole winter. I sat in the blue chair by the window and read the same paragraph of the same book two hundred times while he circled closer in increments I could measure only later, looking back.
     The bedroom door sticks in summer. The third stair creaks. The faucet in the bathroom runs cold for thirty seconds before it remembers heat. These are not flaws. These are the bones of a life I built with my bare hands and not enough money.
     Be patient with him. He is afraid of what he wants. He is afraid of wanting. He will offer you small pieces of himself, then take them back, then offer them again. This is not cruelty. This is what happens to a man who was loved wrong early and has been correcting for it ever since.
     I am not leaving instructions for him.
     I am leaving instructions for you.
     There is a difference.

I found this letter in the kitchen drawer six months after I moved in. The handwriting was not his. The paper was soft, translucent, like skin already worn thin.
     I followed the instructions. All of them. I raised the children. I loved them. I cannot now recall the color of their eyes.
     During the renovation he didn't want, I found more. Seven letters folded into the insulation. Same instructions. Different handwriting. Then different again.
     I thought they were warnings.
     I thought I was smarter than the women who came before.
     I am writing my own now. I have been writing it for six hours. I cannot stop. My hand keeps moving even when I tell it to rest. Even when I close my eyes. Even now.
     The coffee maker is not broken. It just needs to be spoken to.
     The children will feel like yours. They are not.
     I understand now. The letters are not warnings. They are how she stays.
     Each woman who writes one leaves something behind. Not in the walls. In the writing. The act of explaining him, of translating him, of making him make sense—that is the binding. That is the ritual.
     That is how the house keeps us.
     I swore I would not write a letter.
     I am writing a letter.
     I swore I would not hide it in the drawer.
     My hand is opening the drawer.
     I swore I would leave.
     But leaving is not one of the instructions.
     I've checked.
     I've read all seven.
     None of them say how to leave.
     Only how to last long enough to write the next one.
     The handwriting in the oldest letter is small. Careful. The letters a child makes when she is first learning to write.
     I know that handwriting.
     I have always known which stair creaks.

The coffee maker is not broken.
     It just needs—

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