The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

I remembered then. Of course I remembered. I had a card for him.

I did not decide to mail it to him on that walk. The decision came later, in a hospital bed in Kokomo, on the third night after surgery, when the morphine wore thin and I lay awake under a ceiling that was not mine and had, I noticed, forty-four tiles on the near side.

I started to think about the drawer.

I thought: I will die in this town. And somebody, Shanna most likely, because there is nobody else, will come with a trash bag and a roll of tape and open the bottom drawer of an oak desk and find six hundred and twelve sheets of copy paper in a stranger’s handwriting. She will do the sensible thing, because she has always done the sensible thing, and she will put them in the bag.

I had spent thirty years writing down what I saw in other people’s children. It had not once occurred to me that the children might want it.

When I got home in October, on the walker, I had a neighbor boy carry the drawer to the dining room table. Then I opened the folder for Kip’s year, the spring of 1991, and found his half sheet, and read what I had written.

It said: Counts the ceiling tiles when he is afraid. Ask him how many, not why.

I read it three times. I thought that if one person in this world had been owed a line like that, he was the one. I put it in an envelope with a seventy-eight-cent stamp and no note, because I did not know what I would say, and I handed it to my neighbor’s boy, and he walked it to the box at the corner.

That was a Monday, the second Monday in October.

On Thursday afternoon the Tahoe was in my drive.

I will not pretend I was not frightened. A county sheriff does not come to your house in the middle of the afternoon to deliver your mail. I got to the door with the walker, and there he was on the porch with his hat in one hand and the envelope in the other.

“Mrs. Lindquist,” he said. “May I come in?”

I said he could. He sat on the edge of the sofa Ode and I had bought when Shanna was twelve, laid his hat on the cushion, and held the half sheet in both hands the way you hold a bird.

“I got this Tuesday,” he said. “I read it at my desk, standing up. I had to sit down. I want to read you the whole thing, if that’s all right. I want to hear if I’m reading it right.”

I told him that was all right.

The front of the half sheet was a copy of his fifth-grade report card from the spring of 1991. Conduct, Unsatisfactory. Math, D. Reading, C. Effort, in my hand, the single word Variable. I remembered the care I took not to write the word Lazy.

He read the back.

“Counts the ceiling tiles when he is afraid. Ask him how many, not why.”

His voice went a little rough on the last word. He stopped, and drew a breath, and went on.

“Thirty-six on the north side. Start there.”

“That’s mine,” I said. “I wrote that.”

“I know, ma’am.” He swallowed. “It’s all there. It’s right. I did count them. I counted them every morning until Christmas.” He turned the page a little, toward the window. “But there’s more.”