The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
My mother died on the twenty-seventh of May, in her own bed, in her sleep, with her hands folded on top of the quilt. The doctor said her heart simply stopped. He said it was the kindest way a heart can go. I had thought so, too, until that moment.
“I graduated on the twenty-ninth,” Jacob said. “I mailed her a picture Monday. I figured the mail was slow. And on Tuesday we saw the notice.”
Nobody said anything.
Then I heard myself say the thing I had been working up to since I walked in the door.
“I need to bring my brother.”
“Of course,” said Rosalie.
“No. I mean, she wanted you at the table. She said so. She said she had a new card ready, with something in it you need to read. I’m holding it. I haven’t opened it. It’s addressed to you.” I held it out. “I’d like us to open it at her table, on your birthday. Both of us there. You, your mother. Julius and me. If you’ll come.”
Jacob did not take it right away. He looked at his mother.
Rosalie said, “Honey, it’s what she wanted.”
“I know.” He wiped his eyes with the dish towel and put the card in his shirt pocket, over his heart, without opening it. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I waited this long.”
On Monday I walked into the Ewing post office at nine in the morning with my mother’s brass key.
Joanne looked up from behind the counter, a woman with reading glasses on a chain and forty years of knowing everyone’s business and not saying one word of it. She took one look at the key and put her pen down.
“I wondered when somebody would come for that,” she said.
“You knew about the box.”
“I know all the boxes, Nancy.” She came around and put a hand on my arm. “Your mother asked me to take care of her, the way you’d mind a plant. She never said what it was. I never asked. A woman is allowed one thing that is only hers.”
I opened box sixty-two. The key stuck, then turned.
There was a single envelope inside. Jacob’s handwriting. The postmark was the first of June.
Inside was a photograph. A tall boy in a green gown and a white cord, standing on a football field, squinting into the sun, with one hand held out to his side as if there were somebody beside him. On the back, he had written: Grandma, I did it. I looked for you anyway. Mom says the mail gets slow. Please write when you can. I love you. J.
I stood in the post office and read it three times.
Then Joanne came and took me into the back room, where the sorting tables are, and she made me sit on a stool and poured me a cup of coffee out of the thermos she kept under the sorting table, a woman of seventy-one in a post office uniform. That was how I learned my mother had been looked after, every Tuesday for eleven years, by a woman who never asked why.
Julius got to Ewing on Friday evening.