My twin sister walked out of our seventeenth birthday party in the sweater our mother knitted her, and nobody ever saw her again. Thirty-nine years later my granddaughter came into my kitchen with that same sweater hanging past her hips and said, “The lunch lady gave it to me. She said you’d know it.”
It was 1987, and Mom had strung white party lights around the whole pool patio behind our house in Joplin. Dad ran the grill in his church shirt, and the cousins ended up sitting on coolers once the lawn chairs were gone.
Mom had knitted each of us a sweater for the day. Mine was covered in little cherries, and Lorraine’s had one big bluebird across the front with the left wing longer than the right, because Mom dropped a row and never went back for it.
“Don’t you dare fix it,” Lorraine said. “Now nobody else on earth has one.”
A little before ten she kissed Mom on the cheek, scraped a fingerful of frosting off the cake, and told us she was getting some air and Uncle Vern better keep his hands off her slice.
That was the last thing I ever heard her say.
She never came back.
No note, no missing bag, no bluebird sweater left in her drawer, and for years I jumped every time the kitchen phone rang.
Dad looked for her until the morning his heart quit. Mom was the one who stopped.
By that spring she’d packed every picture of Lorraine into a box in the crawl space, and nobody said her name at our table again.
Mom is eighty-eight now, in a care home ten minutes from me, thin as a curtain rod and still sharp enough to beat the aides at rummy.
She still won’t say it. I used to think it hurt too much.
Last Thursday made thirty-nine years.
That afternoon my granddaughter Aubrey, who is seven, came in off the bus drowning in a hand-knitted sweater.
“Grandma, LOOK what the new lunch lady gave me!”
The coffee mug went right out of my hand.
A bluebird across her chest, the left wing longer than the right.
I turned the neckband over, and there were two letters in green thread, Mom’s tight little stitches. L.D.
My knees gave out.
“Aubrey, WHO GAVE YOU THIS?”
She rolled her eyes and told me the lunch lady, Grandma, she already said, and the lunch lady told her that if I knew the sweater I should look INSIDE THE HEM.
She pointed at a run of loose stitches under the bluebird’s tail that I had never once noticed.
I picked them open with my thumbnail and slid two fingers in. Something hard.
I pulled it out and SCREAMED.
“Grandma, what is it?”
I couldn’t get a word out.
I had seen it exactly once before, in Mom’s hands, the night Lorraine didn’t come back.
Grandma Dixon’s ring
It was a plain gold band with a flat oval top, worn thin on one side where Grandma Dixon had turned it with her thumb for fifty years. No stone. I’d have known it in the dark.
I sat down in the spilled coffee with it shut in my fist.
Aubrey stood over me with her backpack still on. “Is it yours?”
“It was my grandmother’s.”
“Then why was it in my sweater?”
I had nothing for that. She waited, the way she does, and tugged the bluebird flat against her stomach.
“Did she touch you?” I said. “Did she talk to you anywhere but the lunch line?”
“Grandma. She’s nice. She gave me extra tater tots.”
I got up. My jeans were soaked to the knee and the mug was three pieces by the fridge, and I stood there like I’d forgotten which room I lived in.
“Where is she now?”
“At the end of our driveway,” Aubrey said. “She said to wait till you’re done screaming, and then wave.”
The saucer on Mom’s dresser
Mom wore that ring on Sundays and at Easter and no other time. The rest of the week it sat in a saucer on her dresser, next to a bottle of Jergens and a bobby pin she used for a bookmark.
The night of the party I woke up around two to the kitchen light. Mom sat at the table in her good dress with her right hand closed on something, and she didn’t look up when I stood in the doorway. I went back to bed. I figured Lorraine was in the next room asleep with her shoes on, which was the kind of thing she did.
Monday the saucer was empty. Mom said she’d lost the ring in the pool.
Dad drained it Tuesday. I remember because he did it in his work boots, and he walked the whole bottom of the deep end with a flashlight in the daytime, bent over like he was looking for a dime. He came up with a hair clip, two bottle caps and a dead frog.
He never asked her again about the ring. I don’t think it crossed his mind that there was anything else to look for in it.
What he did instead was drive. Every Sunday after church he took the Buick to the Greyhound station up in Springfield, a hundred miles round trip, and sat on the bench by the ticket window with a thermos and a photograph of the two of us at fifteen. Somebody at a bus station told him once that girls who run go to Springfield first. He believed it for twenty-two years.
Mom stayed home on those Sundays and made pot roast for when he got back.
That was how it went. Dad looked, Mom cooked, and I was the one left over, sixteen minutes older than my sister and suddenly the only copy.
Lorraine couldn’t sew a button on. She had a coat that hung on one thread through three winters because she wouldn’t ask for help and wouldn’t do it herself. Everything of hers that was ever mended, Mom mended, in those tight stitches that looked like a row of ants. I’d have said no hand in that house but Mom’s could put a needle through that sweater.
When we sold the house four years ago and Mom moved into the care home, I did the crawl space myself. I found the box of pictures with Lorraine’s name on the flap in Dad’s handwriting. I carried it to my own crawl space and shoved it behind the Christmas tree stand and I never opened it. Mom would have known if I had. She knows everything. She also beat me at rummy last Sunday, fourteen hundred to nine hundred, and said “Gin” like she was reading it off a stone.
I went to the window. A gray Buick sat at the end of the driveway with its engine off.
The woman at the wheel lifted one hand off the steering wheel and turned it over, palm toward me. I knew that hand. I’d been looking at it my whole life.
The gray Buick
I walked down the driveway in wet jeans and she rolled the window down before I got there.
She had Lorraine’s chin. She had Mom’s eyebrows, which Lorraine and I never got, and her hair was dark brown, going gray at the part, in a ponytail with a hairnet still hooked on one ear.
“I’m sorry about the screaming,” I said, which is a stupid thing to say, and she almost smiled.
“I’m Tabitha Lynch,” she said. “My mother was Lorraine.”
I held onto the roof of the car.
“She died the ninth of March. In Tulsa. It was in her ovaries, and by the time they found it there wasn’t much to do about it.” She said it all in one breath, like she’d practiced it on the road. “She was fifty-six.”
Fifty-six. I had turned fifty-six in June. Nobody had told me I’d been living on both our years.
“She had you,” I said.
“January of 1988. She was five months along the night she left.” Tabitha took her hand off the wheel and held it flat on her knee. “She never told me why. She told me everything else, and that she’d had a twin, and that I’d know you if I saw you.”
“You did.”
“I saw you in the pickup line in August. I got the job at the school in the second week of September.”
I looked back at the house. Aubrey was watching us from the kitchen window with a piece of toast.
“Why not just knock?”
“I did knock.” She nodded toward town. “I went to the care home three times. The woman at the desk said Mrs. Dixon wasn’t taking visitors, and the third time Mrs. Dixon was sitting right there in the day room and looked at me over a hand of cards, and then she asked the aide what time supper was.”
My mother had looked at Lorraine’s face on a woman of thirty-eight and asked about supper.
“Mom told me to bring the sweater to you,” Tabitha said. “She said the ring was for you to hold until you asked your mother what it was for. That’s all she’d say. She said it was your mother’s to explain.”
“Explain what?”
“I don’t know.” She started the car, not to leave, I think. Just to have something to do with her hands. “But I’ll tell you this, because it’s all I’ve got. My mother wrote to your mother every Christmas of her life. Thirty-eight letters. Not one ever came back, and not one was ever answered, and she wrote them anyway.”
Katie at the front desk
Friday morning I drove to the care home with the ring in my coat pocket and the sweater in a grocery bag, and I told myself I was going to ask a question.
Mom was in her chair by the window in Room 14 with a deck of cards laid out in a solitaire she wasn’t playing. She did not look at the bag.
“I’m having a good week,” she said. “Don’t spoil it.”
I put the ring on the tray table in front of her.
She looked at it for as long as it takes to read a name on a mailbox. Then she moved a red seven onto a black eight.
“That’s Mother Dixon’s,” she said. “I lost it in the pool.”
“Dad drained the pool, Mom.”
“Then I lost it somewhere else.” She picked the ring up between two fingers and put it down again in exactly the spot she’d taken it from. “You have your daughter’s boy coming for supper Sunday? That Kevin works too much.”
“Mom.”
“Deal me out of this one, Jennifer,” she said, and went back to her cards.
That was the first time she’d said my name in a month, and I understood she’d done it to shut the door.
I went out and stood at the front desk with my hand on the counter until the aide looked up. Katie. She’d been there eleven years. She did Mom’s hair on Fridays.
“She’s all right today?” Katie said. “She was up at five writing.”
“Writing what?”
“Her letter. She does one every December, but this year she started early. Since the thirteenth.” Katie said it plainly, the way you’d mention somebody had a standing order at the pharmacy. “She asks me to mail it. Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve dropped one in the box on the corner every Christmas for four years now. She told me you knew.”
I hadn’t known.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
Katie’s pen stopped.
“There’s a stamp book in her drawer,” she said. “It’s the only thing she asks the family to buy her. Your brother-in-law, your cousin Vern. They’ve all brought her stamps.”
I had not brought her stamps. That was Uncle Vern, eighty-three, who couldn’t keep his hands off a cake. Vern had been buying my mother stamps for four years.
The box behind the tree stand
I went straight home and got down on my knees in the crawl space.
The box was where I’d left it, flap taped, LORRAINE across the top in Dad’s square capitals. I cut the tape with my car key. The pictures were on top, forty or fifty of them, the two of us at every age, in the pool, at the Fourth of July with sparklers, in our first communion dresses. Under the pictures, a layer of tissue paper. Under the tissue, a bundle with a rubber band that had gone brittle and snapped when I touched it.
Envelopes. Dozens of them, flat, soft as cloth. Every one addressed to Mrs. Gerald Dixon at our old address in my sister’s round handwriting, with a Tulsa postmark, and every one opened along the top with the same neat knife cut.
Mom’s knife cut. She had a letter opener with a mother-of-pearl handle that she kept next to the phone.
I counted. Thirty-eight.
I sat down on the plywood with a flashlight in my teeth and took out the first one. December 20, 1987.
Mom, I’m okay. I’m in a room over a laundromat on South Peoria and it’s warm and I have a job starting Monday. The ring got me the first month’s rent and the Greyhound ticket I’d have never had the money for. Thank you for driving me to the station and for not crying in front of the man at the window. Thank you for telling Dad Springfield.
I read it three times.
I know you think I’m too young. I know you think he’d have been right. But you said he’d put me in the church home for girls and I’d never see the baby, and I believe you. Tell Jennifer I’m sorry about the cherries. Tell her I took the good half of the party with me.
There was no Greyhound ticket in the first year of Dad’s Sundays. There was only a mother who’d driven her daughter to a bus station at midnight, come home, sat at the kitchen table with the shape of a ring in her hand, and in the morning handed her husband a lie about a city a hundred miles in the wrong direction.
I got to the 2009 envelope last. It was thinner than the others.
Mom, I found out from the Globe online that Dad is gone. I’m not going to write what I think. You let him look for me for twenty-two years, and you knew. You had my address. You could have said one word. He died on a Sunday, didn’t he. Did you let him go to Springfield that morning.
I put the flashlight down on the plywood. It rolled, and the beam went across all the pictures on top of the box, all the faces Mom had put away so she wouldn’t have to see the ones she’d made up the lie about.
Then I took the envelopes upstairs, one rubber band at a time, and stood them in a row on the kitchen table like place cards.
Room 14, Sunday
I went in on Sunday at two with the box in my arms and Tabitha behind me in the hall, where I’d told her to wait. She had on the school sweatshirt. She held the bluebird sweater folded over her wrist like a waiter’s towel.
Mom was dealing. She dealt ten cards to each of us as if I had sat down, and I did sit down, and put the bundle of letters on the card table next to the ring.
She looked at the envelopes. Her hands kept dealing.
“You went in my box,” she said.
“Dad’s box.”
“It’s my box. I packed it.” She laid down the stock and turned over the top card, a jack of hearts, and straightened it with one finger. “Your father had no business making me pack it with her name on it. He wrote it on there himself, in front of me, to make a point.”
“Mom, he drove to Springfield for twenty-two years.”
“I know how far it is.”
“You told him she went to Springfield.”
“I told him what he could stand.” She picked up her cards and fanned them. “You want to know what your father was? He was a good man who needed something to do with Sundays. If he’d known she was alive and with a baby in a room over a laundromat, he’d have been in that Buick before breakfast, and he’d have brought her home in a state, and he’d have sent her to the church home on a Tuesday. You think I don’t know him? I was married to him forty-four years.”
“He died looking.”
“He died with his thermos,” my mother said. “He died the way he wanted to, thinking he hadn’t failed yet. That’s a better death than most men get. I did that. That’s what I did for him.”
I had one thing I’d come to say and it came out smaller than I’d practiced. “You didn’t answer one of her letters.”
“I answered every one.” Mom turned a card sideways and set it down on the pile. “In my head. Out loud, in the bath, in the car. You think I didn’t? She’s the one who needed to be gone, and I’m the one who had to be stuck with it. I let her go, and I let him look, and I took what I had. A letter a year. You don’t get to come in here with your bundle and tell me what it cost.”
“Then why’d you start writing back four years ago?”
For the first time her hands stopped.
“Because I was dying in here,” she said, “and I wanted somebody to know I’d done it on purpose. That’s why. I have never once told you that you could have asked me.” She looked at the door. “Who’s out there?”
I didn’t say. I stood up and opened it.
Tabitha stood in the hall with the sweater over her arm. Mom looked at her for a long time. Not at her face, which she’d already looked at three times. At her hands, which were mine.
“She had the left wing longer,” Mom said. “I never could fix that row.”
“Mom didn’t want you to,” Tabitha said.
“No,” my mother said. “She never did.” Then she turned her cards face down on the table. “Jennifer, you can go. You’ve done enough today.”
I went. She did not say my name again that week, and she did not say it the next.
Eleven Sundays
Katie called me at work the first Sunday I didn’t come.
“She’s not saying much,” Katie said. “She had me take her name off your visitor list. I put it back. She had me take it off again.”
I let it stay off. I spent those eleven Sundays at home with Tabitha at my kitchen table, and Kevin and his wife brought Aubrey over, and the five of us went through the crawl space for the rest of the box. A school photo of a girl with braces. A stub from a bus ticket Lorraine never used. A Polaroid of a woman in an Oklahoma kitchen with a bluebird sweater on and the left wing hanging crooked, and the date on the back, 1999, in Lorraine’s round hand: Still don’t fix it.
I’d lost thirty-nine years and a Sunday card game, and I couldn’t tell you yet which one I was paying for.
On the twelfth Sunday in December I strung white party lights across my back porch, which is nothing like the pool patio in Joplin, a slab and two folding chairs and a grill under a tarp. Tabitha brought a sheet cake from the Walmart, yellow with chocolate frosting, because Lorraine had it every birthday in Tulsa.
Aubrey wore the bluebird sweater to the sleeves of her wrists, rolled three times. She’d asked to. Nobody said no.
At a quarter to four Katie’s Honda pulled up and Katie got out the back and opened the front passenger door. Mom came up the porch steps on her walker one step at a time, eighty-eight, with her coat buttoned wrong, and wouldn’t take anybody’s arm.
She stopped at the table. She looked at the cake and at Tabitha holding the knife and at Aubrey in the sweater.
“Is that frosting from a can?” my mother said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tabitha said.
Mom lowered herself into the folding chair, put her bag on her knees, and held out her plate.
“Cut me the corner,” she said. “Lorraine always took the corner.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has a parent they’ve stopped being able to ask the one question.
For more stories about family secrets and the moments that change everything, read the daughter who was dismissed as “playing with spreadsheets”, the wife who discovered what Carly had kept hidden, and the mysterious jar that surfaced after a loan.
