My mom’s handwriting was in a book that came through donations last week.
She’s been dead nineteen years.
The date inside the cover said 2019. TWELVE YEARS LATER.
I’ve worked the donation cart at the Ridgeway branch for six years, and I only applied because she used to bring me there on Saturdays before she got sick.
Her name was Denise. My dad has told me the same six sentences about the hospital in Flint every time I’ve asked, since I was nine.
“Devin, you’ve scanned that one four times,” Pam said behind me.
It was the sevens. She crossed them with a little line through the middle, the way nobody in Michigan does, and the Gs had a loop that went the wrong way.
I told myself people’s handwriting looks alike. But I took the book home in my coat.
Then I went back through the rest of that donation box.
Five more.
Same blue pen, same crossed sevens, dates written inside the front covers. 2011. 2014. 2016. 2019.
One had a grocery receipt tucked at page 200. Tomato soup, cat litter, a four-pack of AA batteries.
The notes weren’t about the books, not really. “D. would hate this ending.” “Tell D. about the dog part, he’d laugh.”
D is me. She called me D my whole life.
A few days later I pulled the donation log. The box came from a Sharon Duggan, Owosso, forty minutes up 52, dropped off in person.
I drove to my dad’s house that night with photos on my phone.
He set his coffee down and looked at the screen for a long time. Then he stood up and went to the sink with his back to me.
“Where did you get that,” he said.
I asked him one question. What hospital.
His hand was still on the faucet when he said it. “THERE WAS NO HOSPITAL, DEVIN. She signed papers in 2007 and I let you have the other story.”
Sharon Duggan came to the desk on Thursday. She knew my name before I said it.
“Sit down,” she said. “She left a box with me in 2014. I wasn’t supposed to open it, and I did.”
What I Actually Knew About My Mother Before Last Tuesday
Not much. That’s the honest answer.
I have one photograph I can find without digging. She’s sitting on the hood of a red car I don’t recognize, squinting into sun, laughing at someone off-camera. She looks about twenty-five. She’s wearing a yellow shirt. I used to think that was her whole personality – the yellow shirt, the squint, someone making her laugh.
My dad gave me the hospital story when I was nine. He sat on the edge of my bed, hands on his knees, and said it in a kind of order. She got sick. It was fast. The hospital in Flint did everything they could. He said it the same way every time I asked for the next ten years, and eventually I stopped asking because the story never changed and he’d get this look on his face like I was pressing on a bruise.
So I built her out of what I had. The photograph. Six sentences. The Saturdays at Ridgeway, which I remember in pieces – the smell of the carpet, the way she’d let me pick two books instead of one if I’d been good, her hand on my shoulder steering me toward the picture books even when I wanted the ones with chapters.
I applied for the job at Ridgeway in 2018, six months after I moved back to the area. I told the branch manager it was because I had library experience, which was true. I didn’t tell her the other part.
Pam has worked there eleven years and she notices everything. She noticed I was scanning the same book four times. She noticed I went pale. She didn’t push it, which I appreciated, but she watched me the rest of that shift and I could feel it.
The Six Books, In Order
I took them out of my coat pocket that night and laid them on my kitchen table.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Front cover, top-right corner, her handwriting: Oct 2011. Below it: D. would hate this ending. Too much sadness in one place.
A collection of Alice Munro stories. March 2014. Still the best. Wish I could give this one to D. directly.
A novel I hadn’t heard of, something about a lighthouse keeper in Maine. August 2014. This one had the grocery receipt. Folded twice, a little greasy at the crease. Kroger. Tomato soup, cat litter, AA batteries, a box of the good crackers, the kind with rosemary. Total: $14.37. Date on the receipt: August 9, 2014.
I was twenty-three in August 2014. I was living in a studio apartment in Ypsilanti, working at a coffee shop, taking two classes at Washtenaw Community College. I remember that summer because my car died and I had to borrow my roommate’s bike for six weeks.
My mother was buying cat litter in Owosso.
The fourth book was a paperback mystery with a broken spine. January 2016. Tell D. about the dog part, he’d laugh.
Fifth, a novel I actually love – I’d read it twice. September 2016. No note inside, just the date and a small star drawn next to it. She drew a clean five-pointed star. I don’t know why that got me but it did.
Sixth. The one that came through the donation cart. The Remains of the Day. February 2019. D. would understand this one now. He’s old enough.
I’m twenty-eight. She thought I was old enough in 2019.
I sat at that table for a long time after that.
What My Dad Said at the Sink
I drove to his house the next evening. He lives twenty minutes away in the same house I grew up in, same furniture, same smell of instant coffee and the wood cleaner he’s used since before I can remember.
I showed him the photos on my phone without saying anything first. Just handed it to him and watched.
He looked at the first one for maybe thirty seconds. Then the second. He set his coffee mug down carefully, the way you put something down when your hands aren’t fully working right. He stood up and walked to the sink and put both hands on the edge of it, back to me.
I asked him what hospital.
Long pause. The faucet dripped once.
“There was no hospital, Devin. She signed papers in 2007 and I let you have the other story.”
I didn’t say anything. I think I was waiting for more, but he just stood there.
“What papers,” I said.
He turned around then. His face looked wrong in a way I don’t have better words for. Not guilty, exactly. More like someone who’d been carrying something heavy for so long they’d forgotten it was weight.
“Voluntary termination of parental rights,” he said. “She left. She didn’t want – she had a hard time, Devin. She wasn’t well. Not the way you think. A different way.”
I asked him if she was alive.
He said he didn’t know. He said the last time he’d had any contact was a certified letter in 2008, a lawyer’s address in Lansing, telling him she was waiving any future claims. He said he’d hired someone to look, once, around 2012, and they’d found a woman matching her name and description living in Owosso but he hadn’t followed up because he didn’t know what he’d say.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said.
“You were nine,” he said. “And then you were eleven. And then you were fifteen and you’d stopped asking.”
I left his house without finishing the conversation. I don’t think either of us was ready to finish it.
What Sharon Duggan Had Been Sitting On
She came into the branch Thursday morning, 10:15. I know the time because I’d just clocked in and my coat was still on.
She was maybe sixty, sixty-five. Gray hair cut practical, sensible shoes, the kind of face that’s been outside a lot. She walked straight to the desk and said, “Are you Devin?” before I got a word out.
I said yes.
“Sit down,” she said. “She left a box with me in 2014. I wasn’t supposed to open it, and I did.”
She sat across from me at the little table we keep near the periodicals. She put her hands flat on the surface.
She’d met my mother at a grief support group in 2009. Not grief for a death – grief for a decision, she said. There were three women in that group who’d made the same kind of decision my mother had, and they met at a church in Owosso on Tuesday evenings. Sharon had lost a son to the foster system a decade earlier. They’d stayed close.
My mother had moved to Owosso in 2008. She’d gotten a job at a medical billing office. She had two cats, one named Roy, one named Biscuit. She read constantly. She kept books the way some people keep journals, Sharon said, writing the dates and notes in the front because she didn’t like writing in the margins but she needed to put something somewhere.
She knew about me. She’d kept track from a distance, Sharon said, meaning she’d asked Sharon to drive past my dad’s house once, in 2010, and she’d seen me in the driveway.
“She wanted to write to you,” Sharon said. “She drafted letters. She never sent them because she didn’t think she’d earned it.”
The box she’d left with Sharon in 2014 was a shoebox, taped shut, my name written on top in blue pen with the crossed sevens. Inside: seventeen letters, never sent. A copy of my third-grade school photo – the one where my collar is crooked – that she’d somehow gotten, Sharon didn’t know how. A note on top of the stack that said Give these to D. when you think he’s ready, or when I’m gone, whichever comes first.
Sharon said she’d opened the box in 2019 when she hadn’t heard from my mother in several months and got worried.
I asked her what she found out.
She said my mother had moved again, somewhere downstate, she thought. She’d stopped coming to the Tuesday group around 2018. She’d left a forwarding address with Sharon for a place in Monroe, but Sharon had written twice and gotten nothing back.
“She’s not dead,” Sharon said. “I don’t think. But I don’t know where she is.”
She reached into her bag and put the shoebox on the table.
Same handwriting on the lid. My name, in blue pen.
“I kept the books because I didn’t know how to give you a shoebox out of nowhere,” she said. “The donation cart was her idea, actually. She thought – she thought if the books came to you first, it’d be softer. You’d know the handwriting before you knew the rest.”
Seventeen Letters I Haven’t Finished Reading
I’ve read nine of them.
The first one is dated December 2008. She starts it Devin, you’re probably seven right now, or close to it. She was off by two years. I was nine. I don’t know if that means she’d lost track or if she wrote it earlier than the date says.
The third one she talks about a dog she saw get hit by a car on her street and how she cried for an hour and thought about calling my dad just to hear that I was okay. She didn’t call.
The seventh one is two sentences. I drove past Ridgeway today. The sign said they’re hiring.
That letter is dated March 2018. I applied for the job in September 2018.
I haven’t gotten to the last one yet. It’s at the bottom of the stack and Sharon told me, without me asking, that it’s different from the others. Longer. She said she read the first paragraph and stopped because it felt like something she shouldn’t have.
I’m going to read it. Just not tonight.
Roy the cat, it turns out, is still alive. Sharon took him in 2018 when my mother moved. He’s sixteen, mostly deaf, sleeps on a heating pad. She showed me a photo on her phone.
He looks like a very tired orange rectangle.
I told her that was a good name for a cat.
She said my mother named him after Roy Orbison because he yowled at night.
I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud for a library, and Pam looked over from the desk. I didn’t care.
My mother named her cat after Roy Orbison. She thought I’d be old enough for The Remains of the Day at twenty-eight. She crossed her sevens with a little line because that’s how her own mother taught her, and her mother was from somewhere in Germany, which my dad never told me.
Sharon told me that last part.
There’s a lot Sharon knows that my dad doesn’t.
I’ve got a name in Monroe and seventeen letters and a shoebox that smells faintly like the cedar stuff you put in closets. I’ve got nine letters read and eight to go.
I’m not rushing the last one.
—
If you’ve ever found something that rewrote a story you’d been living inside of, I think you know why I’m not rushing it. Who in your life needs to read this?
For more incredible tales of unexpected turns, check out what happened when My Wife Handed Me a Sealed Letter the Night Before She Died, or read about the time My Manager Threw Out a Man’s Groceries While the Whole Store Watched – Then He Said My Last Name. And if you’re in the mood for another mind-boggling work story, you won’t believe how My Boss Handed Me My Own Resignation Letter on a Monday Morning.
