The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards

Her mother handled it.

That was the word in the letter. Handled. Mabel Kendall told the neighbors that Alta had gone to Wichita to help her Aunt Vi, who had a bad hip. Alta rode the bus with one suitcase and a lunch in wax paper. The aunt turned out to be a place, a church-run home for girls on the east side of town, with a matron, and a kitchen schedule, and a back door for the babies to go out of.

“Philip was born on the third of December,” Jacob read. His voice was careful and steady, and he did not look up. “They let me hold him because the night nurse was kind and the matron was asleep. I held him eleven minutes by the clock over the door. I counted. I have never been so sure of anything in my life as that I was holding my son, and I have never been so alone. Then they took him down the hall, and in the morning I signed the paper, because my mother had told me that a girl who kept a baby would have neither a baby nor a name.”

He stopped. I could hear the refrigerator.

Eleven minutes. I did that arithmetic later, alone in the car, and had to pull over: eleven minutes by a clock over a door, and then eleven Junes with a stamp.

“Keep going,” I said.

“I came home in February. My mother had told everyone I was thin from the flu. She said to me, in the kitchen, with the dishwater running, ‘We will not speak of this, Alta. Not ever. Not to your father, not to the Lord’s own ears.’ And I did not. I married Glen Dunning in 1959, a good man, who never knew, and I raised two children I would die for. And every night for fifty-four years, until the day he found me, I said one name in my prayers, even though I never knew whether it was still his.”

Jacob folded the letter along its old crease.

“In 2010,” he said, “your mom got a letter. From the agency that took over the home’s records after it closed. My dad had been looking for her for years. He sent a note through them. He said, I am not asking for anything. I only want her to know I was loved by the people who raised me and I’m all right.”

I put both hands over my mouth.

“They met at a pancake house off the interstate,” Rosalie said. “Four times. She drove herself. She told you she was going to get her hair done.”

I had driven her to the beauty shop in Ewing myself, two years before that, when her cataracts were bad. Her hair had never needed anything.

“Your dad was in the memory care wing by then,” Rosalie said gently. “And she could not do it to you and Julius, she said. She was seventy-one. She said she’d carried it so long that she didn’t know how to set it down without somebody getting hurt.”