The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

The Letter

The envelope came on a Tuesday, tucked in between the Farm Bureau newsletter and a flyer from the hardware store in town, and I almost set it on the counter unopened the way I do with most of what comes through that slot.

Then I saw the handwriting.

It was careful, a little stiff, the kind of handwriting a person uses when they have practiced a letter more than once before they let themselves mail it. My name and address were right, Arlene Sellers, the house number, the county road, all of it correct, but there was no return address in the corner, only a postmark from Ohio.

I do not get letters from Ohio. I do not know a soul in Ohio.

I carried it to the kitchen table the way you carry something you are not sure you are allowed to open, and I sat down in Gordon’s old chair instead of mine, I do not know why, except that chair faces the window and I wanted the light. My reading glasses were already on the table from the crossword. I put them on. I turned the envelope over twice before I let myself slide a finger under the flap.

Inside was a single page, handwritten both sides, and the first line took the floor out from under me before I had finished reading it.

My name is Michael, and I believe you are my birth mother.

I want to tell you I gasped, or cried out, or dropped the page, because that is what happens in the stories. What actually happened is that I went very still, the way you go still when you hear a sound in the house at night and you are trying to decide if you imagined it. I read the sentence again, out loud this time, just my own voice in an empty kitchen, to make sure the words were really there and I had not put them there myself out of forty eight years of wondering.

I did not cry yet. I did not call anyone. I sat at that table with my coffee going cold beside me and I read the whole letter twice through before I let myself breathe the way you breathe when you have been holding it without noticing.

Michael wrote plainly. He said his parents, Carl and Jean Tolliver of Dayton, had told him when he was five that he was adopted, gently, the way you tell a child something that should never feel like a secret even though for me it had been the biggest one I ever carried. He said Carl had passed three years ago, heart trouble, and Jean this past spring, and that somewhere in the quiet after burying them both he had finally let himself want to know where he came from, which he said he had never let himself want while they were living, because it had felt like it would hurt them, and he had loved them too much for that.