The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

Five On A Porch

I did not go to any of it. I was not invited to any of it, and I want to say clearly that this is correct, and that anyone waiting for the part where the woman from Dunmore gets welcomed into a family she helped a dead woman take apart is going to be disappointed, and should be.

I sent the barrette in a padded envelope in May. The red and white and blue one with the bent clip that lived in my nightstand for thirty nine years. I did not include a letter. I could not think of one sentence that was not about me.

In July an envelope came back with a Verdell postmark.

Inside was a photograph, four by six, taken on a porch in bright afternoon sun, with five people in it.

Agnes Yellow Hawk is ninety two years old and she is sitting in a chair in the middle, and the chair, I am nearly certain, is the good chair that got moved to face the road in 1988. Arlene is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder. Winona is on the step below with her grown son, who is twenty eight and has her flat, funny face.

And on Winona’s knee there is a little girl, four years old, Agnes’s great great granddaughter, in a purple shirt, squinting into the sun, in the middle of saying something to somebody off to the side of the camera.

Clipped above her ear, crooked, is a beaded barrette with a bent clip. Red and white and blue beads in a diamond pattern.

On the back, in blue ballpoint, in a careful hand that presses hard enough to emboss the paper, it says: All 63. She has them all.

That is the whole note. It is not addressed to me and it is not signed.

I have it on the windowsill over my sink where the barrette used to be.

I have not decided what to do about the plaque in the fellowship hall. I have thought about it every week since July. There is a version of me that walks in on a Wednesday with a claw hammer, and there is a version that lets a dead woman keep the only monument she is ever going to get, and I go back and forth, and I have not moved.

What I have done is stop saying the word saint at coffee hour when people say it about her, which they still do, because she drove children places for twenty six years and kept crayons under the seat and that happened too. Forty one children came through that house. I do not know what is in the closets of the other forty. I have thought about that, and I am not able to think about it for very long at a time.

Here is what I know. My mother was kind to children in a way people could see, and she was capable of standing in a front hall fifty Sundays in a row and looking a nine year old in the face and telling her nobody wrote, and both of those were the same woman, and she was my mother, and I loved her, and I buried her, and eight weeks later I found the box.

And a girl who asked a question every week for fourteen months finally has the answer, thirty nine years late, in sixty three sealed envelopes in her own mother’s handwriting.

Her mother wrote to her every single week.

Somebody just decided she did not need to know.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.