The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
I had told him over the phone the Saturday night we got home from Salina. I want to say I handled it well. I called him from Mom’s porch, and I said, Julius, sit down, and then I could not say it. Ivan took the phone from me and told him the way Ivan tells everything, in about eleven words. Then there was a long silence on the line.
“Is this a joke,” Julius said. “Because it’s not funny.”
“It’s not a joke.”
“Mom,” he said. “Mom had a baby. Before Dad. And she never.”
“I know.”
“She told some man at a pancake house.”
“It was her son, Julius.”
“Before she told me.” His voice went up. “I’m fifty-five years old, and I sat in her kitchen every Christmas, and I told her about my divorce, and my kids, and she looked me in the face the whole time and never said I have another one.”
I let him say it. I had said it all myself on Saturday night in the bathroom with the fan on.
Then I said, “She was seventeen, Julius. Grandma told her never to speak of it. She carried it for seventy years.”
He didn’t answer for so long I thought the line had dropped.
“Is he like her?” he said finally.
“He’s got her thumbs.”
Julius made a sound I had not heard from him since Dad’s funeral.
“I’ll be there Friday,” he said. “I have to clear my week. Don’t open that card without me.”
He drove the last seven hours straight through. He walked into Mom’s kitchen at ten past seven on Friday evening with gray in his stubble and a gas station coffee, and he stood in the doorway looking at the table. He’d been looking at that table for fifty-five years, and I saw him look at it as if it were new.
“I was the baby,” he said. “I always thought I was the baby.”
“You still are,” I said. “You were the one she got to keep. It nearly killed her to know the difference.”
He sat down in his chair and looked at the oilcloth for a while, running his thumb along a burn mark from 1981 that none of us had ever been allowed to mention.
Sunday was the fourteenth of June, a clear morning, the wheat standing gold on both sides of the county road.
We went to church as a family. I mean all of us: Ivan, Julius, Rosalie, Jacob, and me. We sat in the third pew from the front on the left, where Alta Dunning had sat every Sunday of her married life. The minister looked up from the pulpit and saw a young man in a borrowed tie sitting between Julius and me. He did not know the story. He read the passage for the day anyway, because it was the one that came up in the lectionary, and I think the Lord has a sense of humor, because it was Psalm 68.
God sets the solitary in families.
Jacob read it along with the congregation, quietly, from the hymnal, and I felt Julius’s arm come around behind him and rest on the back of the pew.