The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
I did not know a Jacob Ames.
I called Julius from the driveway, with the box on the hood of my car.
“Some boy from church,” he said. I could hear an airport behind him. “She did things like that, Nance. Sponsored somebody. Mail the card and let it go.”
“Mail it where? It’s to Salina. It’s got an address, but no phone number. Nothing. I looked up Jacob Ames in Salina on my phone and there are forty-one of them.”
“Then call the church.”
“Which church?”
He didn’t answer that.
“Julius. Eleven years. She sent a boy a card for eleven years and I never saw one go out. Did you?”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“Neither was I.”
He sighed the way he does when he is tired and trying to be kind. “Mom was a private woman. If she wanted us to know, we’d know. Do what you think is right and call me tomorrow.”
I stood in the driveway after I hung up and thought about the things I had not been looking at.
In March of 2015, Mom had driven to Salina for an old friend’s funeral. She was seventy-six then. She had put on her navy dress and the pearl pin, and she’d come home four hours later and parked the Buick in the driveway and sat in it for twenty minutes with the engine off. I watched her from the kitchen window. I was making supper for my own family that night. I thought, she’s grieving, leave her be.
I never asked who the friend was.
And every Tuesday for as long as I could remember, Mom had walked the four blocks to the post office, in any weather, though our mail came right to her door. She said she liked the exercise. She said she liked to see Joanne at the counter.
I had believed every word.
Ivan came up the walk and looked at the box on the hood and then at my face. He has been married to me for thirty-six years. He doesn’t talk much when it matters.
“How far is Salina?” he said.
“Ninety-one miles.”
“I’ll get the keys.”
“Ivan, I don’t have a name for anybody. I don’t know whether he’s a kid or a grown man or what his mother will say when I show up with Mom’s money in an envelope.”
“You don’t have to know,” he said. “You just have to take it to him.”
We left at six the next morning with a thermos of coffee and the shoebox on my lap.
The interstate runs flat and gold that time of year, wheat standing high enough to go to heads and farmers already oiling their combines. Ivan drove with one hand and said nothing for most of an hour. I read the notebook again. Then I read the three envelopes that had come back, studying the postmarks. Red stamps. Not Known. Unable to Forward.
The street in Salina was a short block of small houses with deep porches and chain-link fences. A yellow house, third from the corner. A porch swing. A bicycle with a flat tire leaning against the rail. And staked in the front yard, sun-faded already, a sign shaped like a graduation cap: Congratulations, Jacob.