The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

The Porch Four Hours West

She was not hard to find. That is the part I think should make people angriest, and it is certainly the part that made me the angriest.

It took me a little under two hours at my own kitchen table. Winona Rose Yellow Hawk is forty eight years old at the time I am writing this. She lives eleven miles from the house her mother was writing from in 1987, and she has driven a school bus for that district for nineteen years. Route six. Her name is on a public webpage with the transportation office phone number under it.

A woman with a laptop and one afternoon found her from a dead woman’s closet, in a town four hours away, without knowing her real name until that same month.

I did not call. I wrote, because Lyle was right about that. It took me eleven drafts and the one I sent was five sentences long. I said who my mother was. I said what I had found. I said I had sixty three letters that belonged to her and I would bring them anywhere she wanted, or mail them, or leave them on a porch and drive away, and that she never had to answer me, and that either way they were hers.

She called nine days later. She said one thing on that call. She said: are they open.

I said no. Every one of them is sealed.

She was quiet long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped. Then she gave me an address and a Saturday.

Her house is a green house with a chain link fence and a satellite dish on the roof, and there was a car seat in the back of the sedan in the drive. She came out on the porch before I was out of my car, and she stood at the top of the steps with her arms crossed, which I understood. I did not go up. I stood at the bottom with the box.

She has her mother’s hands. I knew that before I knew anything else about her, because I had been looking at that handwriting for a month and the hands that made it were right there on the porch rail.

She looked at me for a long time and she said: you were the little one.

I said yes.

She said you had a stuffed dog with one ear.

I did. I had forgotten entirely. I have not thought about that dog in almost forty years, and she brought it out of the air on a porch in Verdell, and that is when I lost my composure, not before.

I gave her the box. She set it on the porch swing and she did not open it, and she asked me only one real question that day.

She asked whether my mother had read them.

And I had to stand at the bottom of the steps and tell her the truth, which is that no, they were all sealed, every one, all sixty three, that my mother had carried them in from the mailbox for two years and put them in a shoebox in a closet without ever once looking inside.

Winona took that in. And then she said the sentence I have not been able to put down since.

She said: so she never even wanted to know what she was taking.