The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
I knew them. I didn’t know them, but I knew the handwriting on the envelopes, and I knew the rest of the box would hold twenties.
“The first one I ever got, I was eleven,” he said. “I don’t remember much about it. Mom says I asked who the lady was and she said, somebody who loved my dad before he was my dad. I put that card in the can. I’ve put every one in the can.”
“There were supposed to be eleven,” I said. “She wrote it down.”
“The first three came back,” Rosalie said. Her voice was low. “That’s my fault, Nancy. I’m going to tell you how.”
She told it at that table, with her hands around a cup she did not drink from, and Jacob never once looked away from me.
Her husband, Philip Ames, died in March of 2015. A heart attack at fifty-eight, in the produce section of a grocery store, between the bananas and the plums. There was no warning. He’d taken his pills. He’d been laughing at the checkout girl a minute before.
“Jacob was seven,” Rosalie said. “Seven and a half. He thought his father was coming back from the store.”
The medical bills from the two years before, when Philip had been told to watch his heart, finished what the grief started. The house went in May. Rosalie and the boy moved onto her sister’s couch in Abilene, and then a rental on the south side, and then a basement apartment with a window that looked at somebody’s tires. Three addresses in nine months. The mail sorted itself out the way mail does.
“I never saw the first three cards,” she said. “I swear to you. I would have opened every one. I didn’t know a card was coming. I only found out she’d been sending them when the fourth one reached us, in a letter from Pastor Rolfe at Philip’s church, because your mother had written to him and begged him to find the new address.”
“Why would she write a pastor?” I said.
Rosalie took a long breath.
“Because Philip was her son,” she said.
I want to tell you that I understood it right then. I did not. I heard it the way you hear someone speaking underwater. The words arrived, and nothing in me was set to receive them.
“My mother had two children,” I said. “Julius and me.”
“Your mother had three,” said Jacob quietly. “She just didn’t get to keep the first.”
Here is what she told me, putting it together from what Philip had told Rosalie, and what my mother wrote in the long letter she sent Jacob on his sixteenth birthday, which he brought out of his bedroom in a plastic sleeve and read to me because my own hands were not steady enough to hold it.
In the spring of 1956, my mother was seventeen years old, a Methodist farm girl from Ewing, Kansas, the only daughter of Clyde and Mabel Kendall. There was a boy named Ronnie, who was nineteen and had a car and a good laugh. By the time she understood what was happening to her body, Ronnie was in basic training at Fort Riley, and he did not write back.