The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
“Graduated,” Ivan said.
“Recently,” I said.
He shut off the engine. “I’ll wait here,” he said. “Go on.”
I walked up the sidewalk with the card in both hands. It was only an envelope, but it weighed what a casserole weighs when you carry it into a funeral.
The bell had a little electric chime. Footsteps came down a hallway. The door opened.
A tall boy with a dish towel over his shoulder stood there. Eighteen, nearly nineteen. Hair the color of wet sand, a long, patient face, and a way of standing with his weight on one hip that I had seen all my life and could not place.
He looked at the card first. Then at me.
“You’re Nancy,” he said.
“How do you know my name?”
He took the towel off his shoulder and folded it in half, slowly, the way you do when you’re deciding something.
“Because I’ve been writing to your mother since I was twelve,” he said. “Mom! Mom, come here. It’s her daughter.”
The kitchen smelled like coffee and bleach and something with onions. A woman in her late forties came out of the back room, drying her hands on her jeans. She was small, with a gray streak she hadn’t colored over. She looked at me, and then her eyes went to the card, and her whole face changed.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, you came.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. I found these in my mother’s closet, I don’t know who you are, I only know she’s been, I’m sorry. She died. On the twenty-seventh. I should have said that first.”
“We know,” the woman said. “We saw it Tuesday. Sit down. Please. I’m Rosalie.”
She put me in a chair. She put coffee in front of me. Jacob sat across the table with his hands flat on the oilcloth, and Ivan, who had come up the walk after all, stood in the doorway holding his cap.
“We didn’t come to the funeral,” Rosalie said. “I want you to know why. We didn’t see the notice until three days after. We read it online, we look at it every week, just in case. And then we talked about it all night, whether to drive over. Whether we had any right. She never wanted us to, you see. She asked us not to. It was her story to tell.”
“What story?” I said.
Rosalie looked at Jacob. Jacob looked at the card in my hands.
“Can I show you something first?” he said.
He went down the hall and came back with a coffee can. A Folgers can, the red kind, with the plastic lid worn gray at the edge. He set it in front of me and took off the lid.
Cards. Eight of them, standing on end like a recipe box. Hallmark, mostly. A horse. A fishing boat. A kitten in a teacup, which a twelve-year-old boy must have loved very much. A drawing of a basketball in a net.