1969, and then walked out of my life when I was four years old. It was my mother. It was Charlene, in an ivory dress with lace sleeves, laughing up at my Uncle Dewey on the steps of a little chapel in Pecan Bell. I turned the frame over. On the back, in his square handwriting: Our day, October 1983. Dewey, forty one years old, and a bride I had been told never wanted to be a mother. I sat on that bed beside her dress and said her name out loud for the first time in years. I was fifty four years old, and I felt exactly four.
The manager had followed me to the door, and she was crying before I said a word. “Miss Sherry, I think you need to go to Sunrise Gardens on Ryan Street,” she said. “Your uncle drove there every Saturday morning. He never let me say why.” I did not remember driving. I only remember a nurse at the front desk of a clean yellow building in Lake Charles, asking if I was family, and me saying, “I think I have been family for a long time. I just did not know it.” The hallway smelled of lilac soap and warm bread, and a radio played an old Cajun waltz somewhere.
Room twelve had a window facing the water. A tiny woman with white hair sat in a chair by it, a blanket over her knees, folding and refolding a napkin. She looked up at me and her whole face changed. “Sherry Ann,” she said. “You have my daddy chin.” I could not speak. She held out both hands, and they shook, and I took them. “I did not leave because I did not want you,” she whispered. “I left because I was so sick, baby, and I was so afraid.”
The bride was my own mother, who had been loved and cared for in secret by Uncle Dewey, and now she is finally home with me.
She told me it started after I was born. A heaviness she could not name, in a time when nobody talked about such things. By 1976 she could barely get out of bed, and one morning she was scared enough of herself that she packed a suitcase and begged my daddy to let her go and get well. He agreed, and he made up the story about her not wanting a child. “He thought you would hurt less,” she said. “I never held it against him. He was trying to protect a little girl.” Her voice was thin but steady, like a thread that had been mended many times.
“Your Uncle Dewey found me at a church shelter in Lake Charles in 1979,” she went on. “He brought me soup every day for a year. He never asked me for one thing. When I finally got strong, I asked him why. He said that his brother had married the best girl in Louisiana and nobody had helped her.” She smiled then, a small smile. “I wrote your daddy and begged his forgiveness. We divorced in a kind way, with a lawyer. Dewey and I married in 1983. Quiet. Just us and the priest.” I had to look away from her, out at the sunlight on the water.
I asked her why she never came to find me. Her eyes filled. “Oh, I tried. I sent letters. Your daddy sent them back with a note, asking me to wait until you were grown, and then I was too ashamed, and too frail. Then I was too late.” She glanced at the window. “Dewey kept saying someday. He bought that park so I would have a home, and he kept lot nine so I would always have a place to sit in the evening and hear the bayou. He took me every Saturday at sunset.” She said it plainly, with no excuses, which made me love her more.
“For one hour,” I said, and she nodded. “It was all my heart could stand, honey. One hour in my own little house, with my dress on the bed so I would remember I had been a happy bride. Dewey would hold my hand, and we would drink coffee out of the two cups. Then he would take me back here. Last month, the nurses told me he was gone, and I asked them to please find my girl before I forgot how to ask.” By the end of the visit, the nurse had turned the radio down and was pretending to read a chart.
The nurse brought us tea, and my mother asked about everything. Did I like my job at Shoney, did I have children, did I still hate green beans. She laughed when I said yes to the last one. Then she asked if she could see my hands, and she turned them over and studied the palms, the way a person studies a map of a place she has missed. “You have your Uncle Dewey way of listening,” she said. I told her he had raised me without ever being asked, from three counties away, and she smiled as if I had just handed her a gift.
I called my husband from the hallway, and I called my son, and then I just stood there, a fifty four year old woman shaking like a leaf. When I went back in, Charlene was holding the napkin to her chest. She had folded it into a tiny bride, with a veil. “I made it for you in 1977,” she said. “I made one every year. Dewey kept them in a shoebox.” She had made forty seven of them. There was one for every birthday I had.
We moved her to lot nine in July, with a nurse who comes twice a day and a porch swing Dewey had already ordered. I sit with her every evening at sunset, and the bayou does not have to hurry for either of us. She wears the dress on my wedding anniversary, a day early, just to hear me laugh. Last night she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Welcome home.” It was written on the doormat, but she meant it for me. The mailbox now carries both our names, written in my own hand.
