“…you were forty years old,” I read aloud, with my husband staring at the page in my hand, “and I wrote to you every month for seventeen years. Not one letter was answered. I thought you had chosen silence. I did not know until this raffle that someone had been taking my mail.” I looked up. Dennis stood by the kitchen window with his arms crossed, his jaw working. The sealed envelope trembled in my fingers, and the rest of the letter swam before my eyes. Across the table, the young woman from the charity sat very still, with her hands folded on a clipboard, as if she had walked into the wrong house.
“Where did you get this?” my husband had demanded, a minute earlier, when he snatched the page from my hand. I had taken it back, quietly, and now I held it against my chest. “It came with the check,” I said. “It was written for me, Dennis. By a woman named Dorothea Pryce.” He did not answer. Instead, he asked the charity worker to leave. She looked at me, and I nodded, and she gathered her things and slipped out the door, leaving a card on the counter. When she had gone, the kitchen was so quiet that I could hear the old clock above the stove.
“She was supposed to be gone,” Dennis said at last, in a hollow voice. “Linda, she was supposed to be long gone by now.” I stared at him. Thirty one years we had been married, and I had never heard that tone, the dull, defeated tone of a man at the edge of a cliff. I unfolded the letter on the table and began to read it again, aloud, slowly, from the start. Dorothea Pryce was eighty four. She had been my birth mother best friend. And she wanted me to know that my mother had left me something.
A charity raffle, a sealed envelope, and a letter that made her husband snatch the page out of her hands.
I had been adopted at three weeks old by two lovely, ordinary people in Kansas, who had told me the truth early and gently. My parents passed within a year of one another, when I was forty. I had thought about searching, but I never did. Dennis had always said the past was the past. He had said there was nothing to find, that the agency had closed, that records were sealed. I had believed him. He handled the mail, the taxes, the bank accounts, everything, because I had never been good with details and had trusted him to be.
The letter continued. My mother, Ruth Ellison, had given birth to me at nineteen, in 1968. She had been unmarried and frightened, and her family had forced her to give me up. She had gone on to a quiet life as a schoolteacher in Wichita, and had never married. She passed away at seventy, leaving me a trust of three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, to be paid on my fortieth birthday, with a note: For my daughter, with all my love. Dorothea had been the trustee. She had written to me at our address, a letter a month, for seventeen years.
I put the page down. Something very cold and very clear settled in my chest. “Dennis,” I said. “You opened my mail.” He said nothing. “You intercepted the letters. And you took the trust.” He sank into a chair and put his face in his hands. In a muffled voice he confessed it all. He had seen the first letter by chance, he said, and he had panicked, because the business had been failing, and he had forged my signature on the form to collect the check. He had meant to repay it. He had meant to tell me. Then the money was gone, and he could not.
I did not scream. I thought I might, but when the moment came, I only felt tired. I stood and washed the cups in the sink, slowly, one by one, and dried my hands on the dish towel. “I need to meet Dorothea,” I said. He lifted his head. “Linda, please. Let me fix this.” I turned and looked at him, this man I had shared a bed with for three decades, and for the first time I saw how small he had become. “You cannot fix it,” I said. “You can only tell the truth, to a lawyer, tomorrow morning.”
I drove to Wichita on Saturday. Dorothea lived in a small yellow house with a porch swing and a garden of roses, and she met me at the gate in a lilac cardigan with a cane in her hand. She looked at my face for a long time, with her pale blue eyes brimming. “You have her mouth,” she whispered. She took me inside and showed me a shoebox full of photographs. There was Ruth, in a graduation gown. Ruth, in a classroom, surrounded by children. Ruth, in a garden, holding a baby bonnet. On the back of every picture she had written the date, and a single word: Waiting.
The trust was recovered, with interest, through a court order. Dennis pleaded guilty to fraud and forgery, and was sentenced to five years. He wrote to me from prison, and I read every letter, and I did not reply. I used a portion of the money to buy a small house in Wichita, three streets from Dorothea, with a window seat and a view of her garden. We have tea together every afternoon. She tells me about my mother, who loved lemon cake and hated cold weather, and who sang off key to the radio. I listen to every word.
Last month, I entered another raffle, on a whim, at the church fair. My neighbor laughed at me. “You do not need to win anything,” she said. I smiled. I did not win. But I bought a ticket with a heart, and I kept the stub, and I tucked it in the shoebox with the others. It sits there now, between a lock of fair hair and a baby bonnet, under Dorothea careful handwriting. Waiting, it says. It is not true anymore. I have arrived, and I am home.
