The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

The Day She Was Gone

November of 1988. I came home from school on a Wednesday and the spare bed was stripped.

The sheets were gone. The pillow was gone. There was a rectangle of brighter carpet where her book bag had sat against the wall. The bed was made up bare with the blue quilt from the hall closet, the one we used for company.

My mother was at the stove. She told me Rose had gone back to her people.

That is the exact phrase. Gone back to her people. I have turned that sentence over more times in the last six months than I have turned over anything in my life.

I was eight. I cried and I asked when she was coming back, and my mother said she was not coming back, she was home now, and that this was a happy thing and I should be glad for her, and did I want to help with the potatoes.

So I was glad for her.

That is the thing I cannot get past. For thirty nine years I was glad for her. Whenever she came into my mind, driving, or hearing a song, or seeing a girl with a braid in a grocery store, I thought: Rose went home. Rose got to go home to her mother. And I was glad.

I asked about her for a few months. I asked at Christmas whether we could send her something. My mother said we did not have the address, which was the last lie in the sequence and, I think now, the boldest one, because the address was on sixty three envelopes in a shoebox in her closet and she had written it out herself on the county form.

By spring I had stopped asking. Children do. That is not a defect in children.

I found the barrette that spring, under the radiator in our room, red and white and blue beads with the clip bent. I kept it in a jewelry box with a ballerina in it, and then in a coffee can, and then in a drawer, and I moved it four times as an adult, to two apartments and two houses, and I could not have told you why. It was in my nightstand in March when I opened that shoebox. It is on the windowsill over my sink as I write this.