The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Envelope

Start in March of 1987, because that is where the real trouble begins, and it began with a kindness.

I was twenty-eight that spring, married to Orris Nunnally four years, with a baby boy on my hip and sixty-two Holsteins in the barn behind the house. We farmed on Route K, three miles out of Marble Hollow. Next door, across a fence line and a stand of cedars, lived a woman named Verdis Rakes, sixty-three years old, a widow, and the mother of a daughter in town named Berniece, who had married Arvel Brannock from the county road crew three years before.

I did not know Berniece then. I knew her the way you know the minister’s wife’s daughter, as someone to nod to at a church supper. I knew Verdis very well. She was my neighbor and my second mother, and she taught me to make a pie crust without a recipe. She also put things where she could not find them. It was the family joke.

Berniece had her baby on the sixth of March, a girl named Hollie, at the hospital in Springfield. That week Verdis drove into town to keep Berniece’s house for her, water the plants, bring in the mail, wash the dishes, the things a mother does when her daughter is in a hospital bed.

On the kitchen table, Verdis found a drawing. A long piece of freezer paper, pencil lines, a star with eight points and a flower in the middle. It was lying beside a half-finished baby list and a coffee ring, the way a thing lies when its maker has stopped thinking about it because she has gone to have a child.

Verdis stood at my kitchen door on Wednesday the eleventh of March with that paper rolled in a manila envelope. She said, “Thelda, I’m not safe with this. I put things in the hymnal and can’t find them till Easter. That girl’s got a new baby and a hundred things on her mind, and this is the best thing she’s ever made, and she doesn’t know it. You’re the one on this road who keeps things. Keep it till she asks.”

She had written a note on the outside in her slanted capitals, and she pinned it to the paper with a straight pin. I can see it still.

THELDA, KEEP THIS FOR HER IN CASE SHE EVER LOSES IT. SHE WILL. V.H.

I put it in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed. That chest was my mother-in-law’s wedding present, filled with my veil, a christening gown, the boy’s first shoes, and the good tablecloth. I laid the envelope on top of the tablecloth and shut the lid. I thought: a few weeks. Verdis will tell her.

Verdis, I learned much later, believed that she had told Berniece. She told everyone she had told everyone. Berniece came home from the hospital, searched her house for a week, and decided, as busy mothers do, that a piece of paper must have gone out with the diapers. Nobody told me she was looking. I was not in her life yet.