The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

I have to tell you the part I am least proud of now.

I never read them again.

I wrote each line one time, the way you say a prayer you do not expect to be answered, and I shoved the drawer shut and went to make supper. It never occurred to me that a drawer you do not open is not a gift to anyone. It is just a drawer.

Let me tell you about the child I did not write a card for.

My husband, Ode, ran the hardware counter on the square for forty-one years, a slow, big-handed man who gave away more washers than he sold. He is why I could stay late at school. For thirty-some years he put supper on the table at six without once saying it was my night.

We had one daughter. Shanna was born in 1980, and she was, from the first day, no trouble. I mean that in the exact way I would have written it on a card. She read at four. She laid out her clothes the evening before. She did her homework at the kitchen table while I graded other people’s across from her, the two of us scratching pencils in the lamplight, and I remember thinking I had been given the one child in the county who did not need me to wait her out.

She was in the other fifth-grade room, down the hall. I made sure of that. I told the principal it would not be right to have my own child in my own class, and I felt very ethical. I did not know, then, that I was also protecting myself from the sight of her sitting in a seat I could not fix.

Every night, she heard about my day: Ricky, and the ones after Ricky, the girl who would not speak, the boy who hit. I would put down my bag and Ode would hand me a glass of tea and I would tell him, and Shanna would sit at the table with her book and her braids and listen, very still, with her pencil not moving.

I never once asked her what her day had been. I knew what it had been. It had been fine.

I can tell you the exact evening it came to a head, because I have turned it over so many times the edges have worn smooth. It was a Tuesday in the spring of 1997. Shanna was seventeen. We were having pot roast. I had been telling Ode about a boy who had finally said three sentences to me that day after seven months of silence, and I was a little drunk on it the way you get.

Shanna set down her fork. She said, “Mom, is there a card for me?”

I did not understand. I said, “A card for what?”

She said, “The ones you keep. In the desk.”

I should have been startled that she knew about them. I was only tired and pleased with myself, and I laughed. It was the laugh of a woman who thinks she has been paid a compliment.

“You?” I said. “Honey, you’d have nothing for the back. You’re no trouble at all.”

She looked at me for a while. I remember that Ode put his hand flat on the tablecloth.

“Okay,” Shanna said, and picked up her fork, and finished her pot roast.