The Letter Their Father Left Behind

The season ended on a Tuesday night in November. Carleen and Wade had driven into town for the first time alone since the girls were born, just to eat a meal at a table like two married people, and I had kept the babies so they could go. There was an ice storm that nobody had called for. Coming home they went off the bridge over the Obey River where the road dips and sweats and freezes before anything else does. A man hauling gravel found the car at first light. I was asleep on the cot between my sister’s daughters when the sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door, and I will tell you I knew before I opened it. You always know.

So that was the week. We buried them on a Saturday with the whole county in the churchyard, and eleven days later Patricia sat in my kitchen and told me to divide the girls up like a card hand.

I need you to understand who Patricia is, because it is easy to make her a monster and she was not a monster. She was Wade’s older sister, married to a man who sold insurance in Livingston, two grown kids of her own, a brick house, a lawn somebody else cut. She was the kind of woman who ran the church fundraiser and did a fine job of it and let you know she had. She was not wrong that I had no money. She was not wrong that three babies and a lunchroom job was a mountain. What she was, was cold. She had looked at that mountain and done the arithmetic and come out the other side with a plan that was tidy and sensible and that would have erased my sister’s family off the earth, three little girls split into three strangers’ houses who would grow up calling other women mama and never knowing they had been sisters sleeping in one basket. She called that kindness. That is the coldest thing I know, a cruelty that believes it is being reasonable.

I did not fight her loud. I just took the girls home to my place that same afternoon, all three, in a borrowed van with three car seats a church lady had found, and I did not give them back, and after a while Patricia stopped offering to take one off my hands and started telling people she had done her best to help but June was stubborn. That became the story she told. Poor June, stuck with those babies, too proud to let the family share the load. I let her tell it. I did not have the strength to fight over a story. I had three girls to raise.

Twenty two years is a long time to tell quick, but here is the shape of it.