The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

Some of them write back. A man in Indianapolis, who used to hit when people laughed, wrote that he was standing in his kitchen crying like a fool. A woman named Dawn, who once talked only to a janitor’s cat, sent a full page. She had been called shy her whole life by people who never realized she was waiting for someone to start with the cat.

Ricky’s went out the same week. I did not need Kip to tell me where to find him. I had spent seventeen years avoiding him. Kip drove me to the Marathon on a Tuesday, with the walker folded in the back of the Tahoe, and Ricky, who is fifty-four now and heavy through the shoulders, came out of the bay wiping his hands on a rag and stopped walking when he saw me.

He opened the envelope standing up and turned it over. He has said I may tell you what the back says, because he wants somebody to know.

It said: Draws on his desk. Look at what he draws.

He read it twice. Then he walked into the back office without a word and came back with a roll of paper and unrolled it across the hood of the Tahoe. It was the Linden Pike water tower, in pencil, from every angle, dozens of drawings taped end to end with dates down the margin. He had been drawing that tower for forty years, waiting, he said, for somebody to say look.

I had written it down in 1984. I had never once looked.

“I’d have shown you,” Ricky said. “If you’d asked me one time.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m asking now.”

He showed me every one.

On the second Sunday after Shanna came, she called at four o’clock, as she always does. I looked at the kitchen clock out of a habit so old I did not know I still had it. We talked about the weather, and Eli’s job at the pizza place, and my blood pressure.

And then Shanna said, “Well, I should let you go.”

I said, “Do you want to?”

There was a pause. I could hear her thinking. I could hear her decide.

“No,” she said.

We were on the line an hour and six minutes that day. The Sunday after, I do not know how long, because I stopped looking at the clock.

The last thing I did, the Sunday night after Shanna drove home, was lay her senior-year report card on the dining room table under the lamp and read the four lines in her blue ballpoint. I did not change a word.

Then I took a pencil, the old kind, and under her line I wrote one of my own, small, in the hand I am proud of.

It says: Asked. Late. She answered anyway, in under a second.

I used to think my gift was for other people’s children. I know now that the hardest child I ever had was the one who never threw a chair, and that you reach her the way you reach any of them. You sit down in the small seat, you bring your knees up around your ears, and you ask a question with a number in it, and then you wait, and you do not leave.

Thirty-six tiles on the north side of Room 6, Kip told me. Eleven minutes, I gave my daughter, every Sunday, for twenty-eight years. I have stopped counting those. I am counting the other kind now.

I keep a pencil by the telephone, in case.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.