The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
“Nobody would have been hurt,” I said.
“She knew that,” Jacob said. “She wrote it in every letter. She knew it with her head. She said her heart was still seventeen in a kitchen in 1956.”
The Folgers can held more than cards. Rosalie brought out a second one, an old cookie tin, and in it were the letters.
His letters, I mean. Hers to him, carbon-copied in her own hand because she kept a copy of everything she sent him, in case a card went astray. And folded among those, Jacob’s replies, because he wrote back every June from the time he turned twelve and Rosalie told him the truth.
“I couldn’t write to her house,” Jacob said, shy now. “She was afraid the wrong person would open the mail. So she gave us a post office box. Number sixty-two. In Ewing.”
“She checked it every Tuesday,” I said.
“Every Tuesday,” he said. “She said the post office clerk was the only person in town who never asked her anything.”
Joanne at the counter. The only person who ever knew my mother had any life outside my sight. I looked at the horse on the top card, its mane flying, and kept looking at it for a minute.
Ivan put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there.
When I looked up, Jacob had gone very still.
“I asked her to come,” he said. “Every year. I asked in every letter. When I was thirteen I wrote, I want to meet you, Grandma, it’s not a big deal, you could just sit in the car. And she wrote back, Not yet, Jacob. Soon. When I’ve told my children. And I’d say okay.”
“She told you that for six years?”
“Seven.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t,” he said. “She was scared. I’m not mad. I was never mad. I just wanted to see what her hands looked like.”
I held out my hands to him across the table, palms up, before I knew I was going to. They are my mother’s hands. Square, with the thumbs that bend back.
He looked at them for a long time.
“Oh,” he said, and he laughed at himself, a short surprised laugh, and Rosalie laughed too.
There was one more thing. Rosalie got it from the refrigerator, where it was held under a magnet shaped like a sunflower, and she handed it to me.
“It’s the last one we had from her,” she said. “It came in April.”
Dear Jacob,
Congratulations on getting this far. Eat something green. I have a new card ready for the fourteenth of June and it has something in it you need to read more than the money. Someday I would like you at my table, the one with the leaf in it. I will put out a pie. Not yet, but someday. I am working up to it.
Your grandmother, Alta Dunning
She had been working up to it for seventy years.