The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

The Reunion That Had Already Failed

Here is the thing I did not know when I drove out there, and it is the reason any of this mattered to anybody but me.

Winona found her mother in 2011.

She was thirty three. She had spent years on it, and she finally found Arlene Yellow Hawk living in Verdell, eleven miles from where Winona had ended up herself, and she drove over one afternoon and knocked on the door.

And it did not take.

They saw each other maybe six times in fifteen years. Christmas twice. A funeral. Winona told me this sitting on the porch steps with the box between her feet, in the flattest voice you ever heard, like she was reading a route sheet.

Because Winona walked up to that door in 2011 believing, the way you believe the floor is there, that her mother had let her go and never come looking. That is what she had been told, in a hallway, on Sundays, for fourteen months, by a licensed foster mother with a plaque coming to her in the fellowship hall. Nothing came for you. Nobody wrote.

And Arlene opened that same door believing her daughter had received sixty three letters and had chosen, for two years and then for twenty more, not to answer a single one.

Both of them were being polite to a person they thought had thrown them away. For fifteen years. Eleven miles apart.

That is what my mother’s shoebox did. It did not only take fourteen months. It took the reunion too, and the reunion was the part that was supposed to survive.

Winona called me on a Thursday about three weeks later. She had read them in order, a few a night, at her kitchen table, which is what I had done, and I do not know what to do with the fact that we did the same thing.

She said she had taken the May one to her mother’s house. The one with the four beds.

She said they sat in the kitchen and her mother read it out loud in Lakota first, because that is how she had thought it before she wrote it in English for a nine year old in a white woman’s house, and then in English, and it took her a long time to get through it.

Then Winona said the only thing she has ever said to me that sounded like forgiveness, and it was not aimed at me, and I am glad it was not.

She said: my mother thought I hated her.

And then she said: I have twenty years back.