She said: Your grandmother kept these because she thought somebody would need them one day, and she meant you. Inside were letters my mother had written in 1974 and 1975, when I was a baby and my brother wasn’t born yet. My aunt made me read three of them, and then she sat down across the table and let me get through them at my own speed. In two of them my mother asks her own mother, plainly, how long it takes to feel something for a child, and says she is waiting and it isn’t coming. She wasn’t cruel about it. That’s the part I wasn’t ready for — she was frightened, and she was twenty-three, and she was telling the truth.
My aunt said my grandmother wrote back every time telling her it would arrive, that it comes late for some women, that she should be patient. Then my brother was born in 1977, and my mother wrote once more, and that letter is four pages of a woman describing what it’s like to finally love your own baby. She uses the word finally twice. My grandmother kept that one on top of the stack, which I’ve decided not to think about too hard. My aunt said she’d taken the box out of the closet in 2009 because she couldn’t stand the idea of me finding it alone after the funeral.
I sat there fifty-one years old, bald, in a house I’d paid for twice over, holding proof that the thing I’d spent my whole life trying to earn had been decided before I could walk. It wasn’t relief and it wasn’t grief exactly. It was closer to being handed a bill I’d already paid and being told I could stop paying it. I asked my aunt why now and she said because I’d finally stopped the money, and a person who stops the money is a person who might be able to hear it. She’d been waiting sixteen years for that.
Ruth still comes Tuesdays and Fridays and has started bringing her own mug, which I take as a good sign. My aunt calls on Sundays and talks mostly about her garden. My mother sent a card in March signed Mom with nothing written inside it, and I’ve put it in the shoebox with the letters, which seems to me like the correct place for it. Scans are clean at nine months. Nobody in Phoenix knows any of this, and I’ve discovered, slowly, that I don’t need them to.
