The Letter Their Father Left Behind

My sister had been in the ground eleven days when Patricia Satterfield sat at my kitchen table, stirred her coffee with my mother’s good spoon, and told me the sensible thing to do was give the babies away.

She did not say it like a cruel woman. That is the part people never believe when I tell it. She said it the way you would read a weather report. Three babies, she said, and no husband, and no money to speak of, and a job cooking in a school lunchroom. Be realistic, June. Her voice did not rise. She took a sip and set the cup down without a sound. We will each take one, she said. There are enough of us. They are four months old. They will never know the difference at this age.

The three of them were asleep in the front room while she said it. Hannah and Katie in the playpen and Josie in the laundry basket because we had run out of places to put babies. I could hear them breathing from the kitchen if I was quiet. I was quiet. I sat there and I listened to my sister’s three daughters breathe and I listened to Patricia tell me the kindest thing I could do for them was hand them out like you hand out puppies, one to a household, so none of us would be overwhelmed.

I want to tell you I said something sharp back. I did not. I was thirty six years old and I had buried my only sister and her husband in the same week off the same icy bridge, and I had not slept a full night since, and I did not have a sharp thing in me. I just said no. I said it quiet, the way she said her part. No. We are not doing that.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said the line I have carried for twenty two years. She said, They are not even yours, June.

That is where this starts. Not with a courtroom, not with a lawyer, not with anything you could sign. It starts with a woman at my kitchen table telling me three sleeping babies were not mine, and it ends twenty two years later in a basketball arena in Cookeville with those same three girls standing up in their caps and gowns and reading out loud, to four thousand strangers and to Patricia Satterfield, exactly whose they were.

Let me tell it in order.