The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

My mother put her in my room, in the spare bed under the window.

For the first three weeks she would not sleep in it. She slept on the floor beside it, on top of the covers, with her jacket still on. My mother told me to leave it alone and let her be, which was, I think, the right call, and I want to give my mother that.

And then somewhere in the fourth week I woke up in the night and she was in the bed.

Those fourteen months are the best part of my childhood. I need to say that plainly because it complicates everything and it is still true. She taught me to French braid on the back of a kitchen chair. She could draw a horse from memory, the whole animal, in one line without lifting the pencil, and I have never in my life been able to do it. She was funny in a dry way that went over the heads of every adult in that house, and she would say something under her breath at the supper table and I would laugh until I got sent to my room, and she would keep eating with a completely flat face.

She was smart. She read two grades up. She did my math homework for me in November of that year and got both of us in trouble because she did it correctly and I could not explain a single step of it.

She was my sister. I did not have the word for what she was, but that is the word.

And every Sunday after church, in the front hall, still in her coat, she asked my mother the same question.

She asked if there was anything for her.

I heard it happen fifty times, probably more. I was seven and I did not understand what she was asking, so I never thought about it, the way you never think about the sound your own furnace makes. She would stand there with her hands in her coat pockets and ask if there was anything for her, and my mother would sort the mail on the hall table and say no, honey, nothing today.

Not one word of it was true.

What She Was Called

There is one more thing from those fourteen months. It is small, and it is the one that makes people at my kitchen table put down their coffee.

Her name was Winona.

I did not know that in March. I want to be clear about it. I was forty six years old when I learned the name of the girl I shared a bedroom with, and I learned it off an envelope in a shoebox.

My mother did not like the name. She said so in front of her. I have the memory and I cannot get rid of it: the first week, at the kitchen counter, my mother saying that Winona sounded like a truck stop out on the interstate, and that she had a perfectly nice middle name, and that we would be using it.

And that was that. She was Rose in our house, Rose at Dunmore Elementary, Rose on the church roll, Rose in my mouth for thirty nine years.

She was nine. She did not argue. She had been in three placements in two years by then and she had learned what arguing cost.

I have thought a great deal about what it does to a child to be told that her name is an inconvenience. I do not have a conclusion. I have the fact that my mother did it in the first week, in front of her own daughter, and that none of the adults in the vicinity ever said a word about it, including the ones with degrees.