Arlene opened the shoebox on the counter of the main post office, and the smell of old paper rose up like a memory. Inside were hundreds of envelopes, tied in bundles with rubber bands that had long since dried and cracked. They were all addressed in the careful cursive of my mother, to the same name. Anna Marie Sobieski, c/o St. Rita Home for Mothers and Babies, Chicago, Illinois. Every one was stamped RETURN TO SENDER. NO SUCH ADDRESS. The home had closed in 1994. Arlene had been saving them for my mother for thirty years, one by one.
“Your mother came in every Friday,” Arlene said, wiping her eyes. “I told her after the first year that it was no use. She said, I know. I just want the envelope to be mailed.” She laid a single, newer envelope on the counter. This one was not stamped in red. It was addressed in a different hand, a smooth round script, to my mother, at the house on Lincoln Avenue. The postmark was from four weeks earlier, from Madison. “This one came back with a reply,” she whispered. “I did not open it. It is yours, Karen.”
I opened it with a trembling thumb. Inside was a single sheet of notebook paper, folded in thirds. It read, “Dear Dorothy. I am fifty six years old. My name was Anna Marie when I was born, and Catherine when I was raised. My adoptive mother passed in March. Among her papers I found a letter from the home in Chicago. Someone mailed me a letter for thirty years, and the post office kept sending it back. I think it was you. If you are alive, I would like to meet you. If you are not, I would like to meet whoever loved me anyway.”
A shoebox of returned envelopes gave one daughter the Friday to bring her family back together in Milwaukee.
I gave my terms to my brothers that Sunday, at the kitchen table in the house on Lincoln Avenue, with the letter in the middle of the oilcloth. “Gary, you will read this. Out loud, if you want. Our mother had a daughter in 1968, before Dad, before any of us. She was seventeen and she was made to give her up. She never stopped writing to her. Thirty years of Fridays. That three hundred forty thousand dollars is not a scam. It was meant for this woman. And I am going to drive to Madison tomorrow to meet her.”
Gary read the letter once, silently. His wife Debbie leaned over his shoulder and read it, too. For a long while neither of them said a word. Then Gary put his big hand over his face, and his shoulders shook. “All those Fridays,” he said, in a choked voice. “I thought she was sending away her pension. She was sending away her heart.” He pushed his chair back, stood up, and walked to the window, and stared at the backyard where we used to play kickball. Debbie went to him and put her arm around his waist.
Then he turned around, and his face changed again. A memory crossed it, and a calculation, and I saw the old Gary flicker. He reached across the oilcloth, snatched the letter, and strode toward the front door, saying we needed a lawyer first, that this woman might be a fraud. On the porch he ran into a mail carrier in blue shorts, a hulking man named Leon who had walked our route for twenty two years and had just come up the steps with the Sunday circulars. “Gary,” Leon said, “give that back to your sister. I delivered the Christmas cards of that lady every year.” Gary gave it back, sat down on the porch step, and wept like a boy while Leon patted his shoulder. I sat beside him and said our mother would want us to drive to Madison, not to fight.
We drove to Madison together on Monday, all three of us. Anna Marie, who goes by Catherine, met us in a coffee shop on State Street. She is a retired schoolteacher with the long jaw of my mother and her careful cursive. She held the shoebox for a full minute without opening it. Then she read the first envelope, and the second, and the third, and she cried so quietly that the whole coffee shop leaned in to listen. We sat there until closing. I said, “Welcome home.” She said, “I never knew where it was.”
The money consequences were easy. The will was read again, and my brothers and I agreed that the three hundred forty thousand dollars should go to the person named, the person who receives the Friday letters. Catherine did not want to keep it all. She asked that we split it with the family, and she gave a third back to the three of us. Gary used his share to pay off the house. Debbie used hers to take a trip with her sister. I used mine to set up a fund for a very particular purpose.
In the name of my mother, Dorothy, who passed in May, I started the Dorothy Schultz Fund. It pays for search costs, DNA kits and counseling for adoptees and birth families in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Racine counties. In the first year we helped nineteen families find each other. A man in Racine, seventy one years old, met his birth mother, ninety three, in a nursing home. He brought her a pie. She held his hand for the whole afternoon. They did not need to say much.
On the first Friday of the next month, Catherine and I rode the 15 bus downtown together, wearing the good navy coats. We walked into the main post office at 10:30. Arlene looked up and smiled. My new sister reached into her handbag, pulled out an envelope, and slid it across the counter, addressed to Dorothy Schultz, Heaven, with a stamp. Arlene held it up to the light, nodded, and dropped it carefully in the bin. “It is mailed,” she said. And we walked outside into the winter sun.
