The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

The Shoebox In The Back Of The Closet

My mother died on a Tuesday in February, and it took me until the end of March to open the door of her bedroom.

Everything else in that house I could handle. I boxed up the kitchen in one afternoon, forty years of mismatched Tupperware and a drawer of rubber bands she had saved off the newspaper since the Reagan administration. I took the good dishes. I let my brother take the gun cabinet and the deep freeze. I sat on the living room floor with a garbage bag and went through a cedar chest of church bulletins, and I did not cry once, which I took at the time as a sign that I was handling things well.

It was the closet in her bedroom that stopped me.

Joyce Pruitt kept a closet the way she kept everything, which is to say in an order only she understood and no one was invited to question. Her church clothes hung at the front by color. Behind them, a row of cardigans she had not worn since her knees went. On the shelf above, hatboxes she had never once put a hat in.

And on the floor at the very back, behind a vacuum cleaner and a box of Christmas garland, a Buster Brown shoebox with two rubber bands around it, crossed like a ribbon on a package.

The rubber bands snapped when I touched them. That is how old they were.

Inside were letters. Not a few. The box was full to the lid, envelopes packed upright on their edges the way you file records, and my first thought was that I had found my parents’ courtship, which would have been a strange and wonderful thing, because my father died when I was eleven and I have maybe six sentences of his handwriting in the world.

I pulled the first envelope out.

It was addressed in blue ballpoint, in a careful hand that pressed hard enough to emboss the back of the paper. Not to my mother. Not to my father.

To someone named Winona Rose Yellow Hawk.

Care of Mrs. Joyce Pruitt, Rural Route 2, Dunmore, South Dakota.

I sat down on the floor of my dead mother’s closet with that envelope in my hand, and I read the name three times, and I want to be honest about how long it took me, because I have gone over it since and I cannot make myself look any better in the telling.

It took me most of a minute.

The name meant nothing to me. Winona meant nothing to me. Yellow Hawk meant nothing to me.

And then my eyes went back to the middle of it, to the one word in that name I had said out loud ten thousand times in my life, in a bedroom I shared with her for fourteen months when I was seven years old.

Rose.

The envelope was sealed. The flap had never been lifted. There was a postmark from October of 1987 and a stamp with a flag on it and my mother’s address in that careful, pressing hand, and it had never once been opened.

I counted them out on the carpet. Sixty three envelopes. Every single one of them sealed. Every single one of them addressed to a nine year old girl who slept four feet from me and asked my mother every week for fourteen months whether her mother had written to her.

And every week, for fourteen months, my mother said no.