The Letter Their Father Left Behind

The girls grew up knowing exactly who they were. I made sure of that from the start. I did not let them call me mama. I was Aunt June and their mama was Carleen and their daddy was Wade and they were up on the hill in the churchyard and we visited them with flowers on birthdays and we talked about them at the supper table like they had just stepped out of the room. I showed the girls Wade’s old shop, still standing empty by the highway, and I told them how their daddy had laughed and cried on my porch steps. I told them how their mama was the pretty one and how she could sing. I gave them their parents the only way I had, in stories, over and over, until Hannah and Katie and Josie knew a mother and father they could not remember.

And here is the thing I have never told anybody until now. There were years I was not sure I had done right. There were nights, after a bad day, after Hannah mouthed off or Katie came home crying over a boy or Josie got picked up for driving too fast on the lake road, nights I lay in the dark in that cot room that had become my room and I thought about Patricia’s kitchen-table arithmetic and I wondered if she had been right. Maybe three families would have given them more. Maybe I had been proud. Maybe I had held on to those girls partly because I had nothing else to hold, because Denny was gone and my own plans were gone and the girls were the only thing that had ever been mine to lose. I never said that out loud. But it sat in me for twenty two years. The quiet question of whether I had saved those girls or only kept them.

Patricia did not help the question. She stayed in our lives the way a cold spot stays in a house. She came to the big things, the baptisms and the graduations from high school, dressed better than anybody, and she had a way of standing in the photographs like she was family that had done its part, and of saying to people, in that reasonable voice, that it was a shame the girls had missed out on so much, meaning no father, meaning no mother, meaning, if you knew how to hear it, no proper family, only June. At Josie’s high school graduation she took me aside by the gym doors and said, You did better than I thought you would, June, in a tone that was all the way a knife. You did better than I thought you would. I thanked her. I had gotten good at thanking her. It was easier than the truth.