I read the lavender letter to its last line sitting on the floor of the shop, with a cat in my lap that had come out of nowhere and the sign in the window turned to Closed. Margaret wrote that she had been told her baby was born too small to live. She was told by her father, Judge Walter Dunning, standing at the foot of her hospital bed on the day after I was born. She believed him for three years. Then she saw me in the checkout line at the grocery store, in the cart of a woman in a green coat, and knew me by my eyes.
Judge Dunning had arranged everything, she wrote. A friend of his, a doctor, had signed a certificate. The Hoffmans, who had tried for nine years to have a child, paid two thousand dollars in cash. My mother was told that the girl had a family who could not keep her. She was not told that the girl had been lied to in her own hospital bed. Margaret did not accuse her. She wrote that she believed my mother had loved me, and that this was what made it so impossible.
Then Margaret told me the thing that made me gasp aloud in the empty shop. She wrote that she had taught kindergarten at Galena Elementary for thirty eight years. I was in her class in the fall of 1968. She was Miss Dunning. I remembered her suddenly, entire: a tall quiet woman in a gray cardigan, with a ceramic bluebird pin, who cut out paper snowflakes and let me keep the one with the broken point. I have it still. It is in a book on my shelf.
A letter that is never mailed is still a letter, and love that cannot be spoken waits patiently in the bottom of a trunk.
I opened the other letters one a night, in order, over seven months, at my kitchen table, with a pot of tea and the cats. The first was written on the evening of my birth, in the handwriting of a child, and it was only a page: Dear baby, they say you are dead and I do not believe them. There was a thick one from 1991, written after the death of my father, describing how she had confronted my mother in a church parking lot and been refused. The last said only: Thank you for letting me be your teacher.
I went to Dubuque on a Sunday in March, at seven in the morning, and surprised my mother in her room before she had done her hair. I set the lavender letter on her lap. She read it with her glasses on the end of her nose, and she did not say anything for a long time. Then she took them off. She said, “I wondered whether she would ever find a way.” That was all she said. That was how I knew it was true.
She told it in a small voice, looking at the window. She and my father had been married nine years and had buried two babies. Judge Dunning, who was a deacon at their church, had come to them with a proposal, in a back pew, after the service. She had not asked a single question. She had been afraid of the answers. She said, “I held you and you stopped crying. I decided I did not want to know.” She wept the way old people weep, silently, with her shoulders.
I wish I could say that I forgave her at once. I did not. I stayed in that room for two hours and said things I will not repeat. She took them without a word. When I had run out, she said, “Gail, I loved you the best I knew how. It was not the right way. It was the only way I had.” I sat down on the arm of her chair. We did not speak for a good while. At the end, she asked if I would do her hair.
Margaret Elaine Dunning is buried in the old cemetery on the hill, under a small gray stone shaded by a cedar. The estate company gave me the papers, and I learned that she left her house, her savings, and the contents of her one steamer trunk to a single heir. The name on the will was mine. She had signed it in 2019, in the presence of a lawyer, with no family attending. There was little money in it. But there was a bluebird pin in the drawer of her dresser.
I sit by her stone on the third of March every year. This year, for the first time, I brought a letter of my own, a short one, and I read it aloud into the wind. I told her I remembered the snowflake with the broken point. I told her I had had a good life, and a good mother, and a good teacher, and that I was only sorry I had not known which was which. I left a paper snowflake on the stone and held it down with a pebble.
The steamer trunk stands in the front window of my shop now, with its lid open and its false bottom raised. It is not for sale. People stop on the sidewalk and ask, and I tell them the whole story. Some of them cry. Some of them go home and call someone they have not spoken to in years. And on the lid, in white paint, are the three letters M.E.D., which I have never touched up, because they stand for Margaret Elaine Dunning, and she was my teacher.
