The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
“Yes,” Fern said. “It did.”
That was all either of us said about it that day.
I asked how she had found me. Fern said the last postcard in the hatbox, the one from 2000, had my return address on it, and that she had found Janet through Pauline Pruitt’s obituary, which named a surviving daughter, Janet Rumsey of Marnell. For me she had searched the church’s own newsletter online, a photo of the Tuesday quilting group with the names printed underneath, and called the church office in August. The secretary would tell her nothing except what time worship let out.
“I told her I was trying to return something to a member’s family,” Fern said, “and she said, ‘Then you can mail it,’ and hung up on me. I drove down anyway.”
“That’s Doreen,” I said. “She’d hang up on the governor.”
Fern had not just found the hatbox. She had spent that summer trying to make it a gift and not a shock. She drove to Marnell in August, to the little yellow house where Janet and Hershel have lived twenty-six years, and sat at Janet’s kitchen table for three hours and put every card into her hands. Hershel stood behind Janet with a hand on her shoulder. When Janet had read them all, she asked one question.
“Is she alive?”
“I believe so,” Fern said. “I have a church and a name.”
Janet told me later that she would not ambush me in a doorway like a salesman. She said I had waited too long for that. She would come on a Sunday, to my own church, where I would have my own people around me. And she could not make her legs work when the Mercury stopped. That was the long and short of why she had stayed in the back seat.
“I needed to see your face before you saw mine,” she said now. “I thought, what if she’s been praying all these years for a little girl, and what she gets is a sixty-one-year-old woman who wears reading glasses and complains about her hip?”
“I wear reading glasses,” I said. “I complain about both hips.”
“I saw,” Janet said. “From the back seat. You walked like it.”
We laughed so hard that Wanda dropped the coffeepot, and it rang off the linoleum like a bell, and that set us off again.
When the ham was wrapped in foil, Arlis drove us home in the pickup, with Fern following in the Mercury, and Janet and I rode in the front with our shoulders touching because neither of us could stand a gap.
Karla was on the porch. Arlis had called her from the church kitchen. She stood at the top of the steps with a dish towel twisted into a rope in her hands, and when Janet climbed down out of the cab my daughter opened her arms. She said “Aunt Janet” without a question in it. I watched the two of them together and thought, there it is, the same chin three times.
Kolton was behind her in a sweatshirt. He looked at Janet for a long moment, then at the telephone in his hand, and set it face down on the porch rail.
“Hi,” he said, which was all a sixteen-year-old could manage. And then, “That spit test, Grandma. It was a good idea. It just wasn’t on her side.”