The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards
Afterward, in the fellowship hall, a woman I had known all my life asked who the nice young man was. “My cousin,” I said, and found that it was true, and that I could say it in a church.
We ate at Mom’s house at one o’clock.
I put the leaf in the table. I had done it so many times, I knew exactly where the pin went, and I did it without thinking and then stood there with my hand on the wood.
Rosalie brought a pie she’d baked herself. Julius brought rolls from the Dillons in town. I made Mom’s chicken and noodles from her recipe card, which I’d found in the drawer under the phone, written in her round, slanted hand. There were seven of us. My two grown kids drove in from Wichita and Manhattan, because I had called them on Sunday morning and said, I need you at Grandma’s table, and they came without asking why. My daughter hugged Jacob in the doorway and said, “You must be my cousin,” and I watched his face.
Julius carved the chicken. He said grace.
He started the way Dad always did, in a rough old-fashioned voice. Then he stopped and began again, slower.
“Lord,” he said. “Thank You for Mom. Thank You for bringing the last of her prayer home. We’re sorry it took us so long. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Jacob.
We ate. It was quiet for a while. Then it was the other kind of quiet, the kind in which people start passing the potatoes without being asked. Somebody laughed. Rosalie told a story about Philip and a stalled tractor. Julius told one about Dad and a mortgage and a goat. At one point I looked down the table and saw my brother and my mother’s grandson side by side, both of them cutting their chicken exactly the same way, with the knife held upside down.
When the pie came, Jacob took the envelope out of his pocket.
“I think it’s time,” he said.
He slit it with Mom’s own letter opener, the one shaped like a little silver sword. A card slid out. A plain card, cream colored, no horse this time, no kitten. The twenty was folded inside the front cover in thirds. And a second paper, folded smaller, in her last, shaky handwriting.
He unfolded it and read it aloud.
Dear Jacob,
You are nineteen today, and I have waited long enough.
When you were born I was not there, and when you were a boy I was not there, and I will tell you why in person, if I have the chance, and if I do not have the chance, then the letters I sent you will have to be enough. I have asked God every night for seventy years what I should do with the love I could not give. I think He answered, finally. I think it was you.