The Boy Behind Eleven Birthday Cards

The first envelope I pulled out of the shoebox had a red stamp across the front that said Return to Sender.

It was my mother’s handwriting. Round and careful and leaning a little backward, the handwriting of a woman who was marked down for penmanship once in 1946 and never got over it. The name on the envelope was Master Jacob Ames. Under that, a street in Salina, Kansas.

I turned it over. The flap was still sealed.

I was sitting on the floor of her hall closet with my back against the vacuum cleaner. Mom had been gone nine days. My brother Julius had flown back to Denver on Tuesday, and my husband Ivan was out in the truck, on the phone with the church about the thank-you cards. I had come in with a trash bag and a mission: the good tablecloths, the winter coats, the things you carry out of a house when the person who owned them is not coming back.

The shoebox was behind the tablecloths. Buster Brown, the lid gone soft as cloth. I almost put it in the bag unopened. Later I would think about how close that was.

There were three envelopes in it. All three had come back. All three had never been opened.

Under them lay a spiral notebook, the kind you buy at the drugstore for sixty-nine cents, and under that, one more envelope, sealed and stamped and never mailed.

I carried the whole box to her kitchen table and sat down in my own chair, the one with my name scratched into the underside in 1974.

The notebook had eleven entries. One line each. Every line began with the same date.

June 14. Card sent. Twenty enclosed.

In the margin beside the first one, in pencil, my mother had written: Hope he likes the horse.

Beside each of the first three it said: Came back.

Just that. Came back. No question mark, no complaint. I knew that tone. It was how she wrote down the price of eggs and the weather and the day Dad died.

Beside the fourth June it said: Pastor Rolfe found me the new street. Thank the Lord.

And beside the fifth June, and every June after it, down to the eleventh, she had written the same three words in her careful hand.

Did not come back.

I read that line seven times in a row. A woman had waited seven Junes for a card to come back, and each year it didn’t, and each year she wrote it down like a small answered prayer.

The last envelope was the one that had never gone anywhere. It was addressed to Jacob Ames, on a different street in Salina, in a hand that had gotten shakier than the others. The stamp was in the corner. I held it up to the window. Inside the card was a twenty-dollar bill, folded in thirds, the way Mom folded every bill she ever gave anybody.

He would turn nineteen on the fourteenth. That was Sunday, a week and two days away.

My mother had died on the twenty-seventh of May, and she had not gotten to the mailbox.