Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
I knew that hand before I knew anything else. My mother wrote her sevens with a little bar through the middle, the way she’d learned in the one-room school.
“Your father said Sue wrote it the week you left for college,” Pauline said. “In case something ever happened and he couldn’t find you. He never copied it onto anything else. He said, ‘If I put it in the phone and the phone breaks, then it’s gone.'” She paused. “That card looks like it’s been handled every day.”
I held it in both hands.
“There’s more,” Pauline said. “I’m not sure it’s mine to tell, but I think he’d want you to know. Behind that card, folded very small, he had two newspaper clippings. A wedding announcement, and a birth announcement. Born to Tom and Lacey Dorn, a daughter. Josephine Susan.”
I made a sound I didn’t know I had in me.
“He read me the middle name three times,” Pauline said. “Susan. Then he said, ‘She’s got her grandmother’s name,’ and then he said, ‘I never got to hold her,’ and that’s when I decided to call you, whatever the rules say.”
“He takes the paper,” I whispered. “From our county.”
“By mail,” Pauline said. “Every week, nine years. He knows who’s on the honor roll and who died and who got a ribbon at the fair. He said, ‘It’s a good little paper. They don’t leave anything out.'”
I put my back against the wall and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor of that hospital hallway in my husband’s flannel shirt, with my mother’s handwriting in my hands, and I put my forehead down on my knees.
Pauline did not say a word. She sat down on the floor beside me, a grown woman in her fifties with bad knees, in a hospital hall at ten to seven in the morning, and put one warm hand on my back, and let me be as long as I needed.
When I could talk, I said, “Why didn’t he call? All those years. He had the card. He had the number. Why didn’t he ever just pick up the phone?”
Pauline thought about it.
“I asked him that,” she said. “Around three. He was humming something, and he said it was a hymn his girl used to sing. And I asked why he’d never called her. He said, ‘A man who’s in the wrong ought to be the one to go to the door. But I was the one who pointed at it. I didn’t know how to walk through the same door I’d pointed her out of.'”
I laughed and cried at once.
“That’s my father,” I said. “Exactly.”
“I thought it might be,” said Pauline.
The sun came up over the Mississippi a little after seven.
I went back in and sat by the bed. A young man named Marcus took over from Pauline, and she squeezed my shoulder on her way out. “Call down sometime and let me know how it goes,” she said.
The room had a window, and by eight-thirty it was full of plain, bright morning, a clear Missouri October day, not a cloud in the glass. The light came across the blanket and laid itself over my father’s hands and mine.
I had taken his hand in both of mine. I had not planned to. It was just where my hands went.