The Letter Their Father Left Behind

Hannah said, There was a woman who was told, by her own family, that the kindest thing to do with us was to split us up. One baby to each house. We would never have known we were sisters. We would never have known each other’s names.

And then Katie took the microphone, because they had worked it out between them, and Katie said, Instead, she took all three of us home in a borrowed van and she raised us by herself cooking in a school lunchroom and sewing other people’s clothes at night, and she never once let us call her mama, because she said that name belonged to the woman up on the hill, and she gave us our mother and father back the only way she could, in stories, every single night, until we knew them.

I was not breathing. I want to be honest. I had my hand over my mouth and I was not breathing, and beside me I could feel Patricia gone stiff as a post.

Then Josie took the microphone, my Josie, who would not take a bottle from anybody but me when she was four months old, and Josie said, Two months ago we found a letter. Our daddy, Wade, wrote it to our aunt when we were three weeks old, before he died, and nobody ever got to give it to her, and we are going to read it now, out loud, because she has waited twenty two years to be told what we are about to tell her, and because somebody in this room needs to hear it too.

And Josie read it. She read my letter. She read my brother-in-law’s words, written in a sleepless house twenty two years ago, out into that silent arena, and this is what Wade wrote, and I know it by heart now because the girls had it framed for me and it hangs in my front room:

June. I do not have the words but I am going to try. You moved into my house and you saved my family. Carleen says you were born to mother these three and I have watched you three weeks now and she is right. I will tell you something I have not told her. I lie awake scared, the way new fathers do, about what would happen to these girls if anything ever happened to us. And then I think of you asleep on that cot between them and I am not scared anymore. If the world ever came apart, you are the one. Not out of duty. Because you already love them more than your own comfort, and that is the whole of it, that is the only thing a mother is. Do not ever let anybody tell you these girls are not yours. They have been yours since the first night you did not sleep. I thank God for you. Wade.