The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

I turned over six hundred and twelve sheets of copy paper, one at a time, at my dining room table, between nine o’clock at night and a quarter to four in the morning. I have never been so afraid of a drawer.

Here is what I found.

Forty-one of them had a second hand.

It began on the sheet for a girl named Jolene, from the spring of 1991, the same year as Kip’s. Under my line, which said, Cannot sit still, she can be given a job, there was one more line in round pencil. Shanna, age ten. She gets her shoes taken at gym. I put them back in her cubby. Do not tell.

I had to put the sheet down for a while.

Forty-one times, over eight years, from the spring Shanna was ten until the spring she was eighteen, my daughter had gotten down on the dining room floor, some night when I was grading or out at a conference, and opened the bottom drawer of my desk and read what her mother wrote about other people’s children. And then she had picked up a pencil and answered.

Not every card. Only the ones where she knew something I did not.

She knew who rode her bus. She knew who ate lunch alone and who traded a sandwich for a milk. She knew what happened in the hall at the other end of the building, in the hours I was not there. She had been doing my job in the places where I could not be, and writing it down on my own paper, in the only conversation she believed she could have with me.

She had answered me forty-one times. And I had not turned a sheet over once.

The handwriting changed as I went. I could watch her grow up, from the round schoolroom pencil of a fifth-grader to the narrow slant of a girl in junior high who has opinions, to the blue ballpoint of a high-school junior. I had never once looked up from my grading.

I do not know how to tell you how that felt. It felt like walking into a house I had lived in for forty-four years and finding a room I had never opened, with her bed in it, made.

And then, at a quarter to four, with the lamp burning low and the coffee gone cold and my eyes stinging from the print, I reached the very back of the drawer.

It was behind the last card, behind the sheet for a boy from the class of 2013 who chewed the collar of his shirt. It was folded once, the way you fold a paper to put it in a pocket, and the paper was soft, as if it had been handled.

It was a copy of a report card. I knew it at once. It was her senior year, spring of 1998, Linden Pike High School. A row of As. A single B in chemistry, which she had cried over. Conduct: Excellent. Under Comments, in the teacher’s hand, the single word Pleasure.

I turned it over.

On the back, in blue ballpoint, in my daughter’s hand, there were four lines, written in the plain way I wrote, the way she had taught herself from reading six hundred of mine.

Never asks for anything. Learned it at this table.

Ask her anyway.

Ask her something with a number in it. She can answer that.

I do not know how long I sat there.