The Letters My Mother Never Delivered
The Girl My Mother Called Rose
You have to understand what my mother was in our town, because it is the whole shape of this.
Joyce Pruitt was a child welfare aide for Dunmore County for twenty six years. Not a caseworker. She was careful about that distinction, she never had the degree and never pretended to. She was the woman who drove children places. She sat in the back seat with them on the way to a placement so they would have somebody to talk to. She kept a cooler of juice boxes in the trunk and a coffee can of crayons under the passenger seat, and when the county could not find anywhere to put a child on a Friday night, they put the child in my mother’s house, because my mother was licensed and my mother said yes.
She said yes forty one times over those twenty six years. I know the number because it is on the plaque in the fellowship hall at Dunmore Lutheran, under a photograph of her in the blue dress, above the words FORTY ONE CHILDREN. They gave it to her at a potluck in 2004 and she made me drive her home early because she said the fuss was unbecoming.
That is who my mother was. That is the woman I buried. I want that on the record before I tell you the rest of it, because when I tell people the rest of it the first thing they want to do is decide she was always a monster, and it is not that simple, and the fact that it is not that simple is the part that has kept me up since March.
Rose came to us in September of 1987. I was seven. My brother Lyle was ten.
She came in the evening in my mother’s Buick. I remember standing at the screen door watching them come up the walk, and I remember she was carrying her things in a paper grocery sack folded over at the top, and I remember thinking that was strange, because when we went to my grandmother’s we used a suitcase.
She was nine years old. She was taller than me by a head. She had her hair in one braid down her back, thick as a rope, and a beaded barrette clipped above her ear, red and white and blue beads in a diamond pattern, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen on a person.