The letters are at Junia’s house now, in the same box, in a closet. All six of them agreed on that. Nobody wanted them thrown out and nobody wanted them in a living room.
I am forty-eight. I still work at Pilcher, days now for the last six years, which is the single greatest luxury of my adult life.
I want to end this on the one thing I actually think about, which is not the box and not the scream.
It’s a sentence she said in my front hall with a baby on my hip.
You can’t give me anything.
She was correct. I want to be very clear that she was correct on the facts. In 2011 I could not have bought that woman a car. There was no coast trip in me. The house on Fennimore was rented and the roof leaked over the back bedroom for two of those years because I could not do anything about it.
What I have thought about, every so often, for fifteen years, is that she did not say for us. She did not say I couldn’t give the girls anything.
She said me.
And so for fifteen years I gave everything I had to the six people she left in that hall, and the truest measure of it is not the braids or the school performances or the nine years of sleeping from six-thirty to two.
It is a cardboard box in an attic, tied with kitchen twine, that I filled up alone over fifteen years because I could not bear to hand my children the proof.
She never sent them a single thing.
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