The address was a little house on the edge of town that I’d driven past a hundred times and never noticed. I wrote it down and sat there for a while because the street name was familiar. My mother had mentioned it once when I was a child, but when I asked her what was there, she’d changed the subject. I drove over the next morning. The house was small, neat, and occupied. An older woman answered the door, looked at me for maybe three seconds, and then said my mother’s name. I asked how she knew her, and she said my mother had been coming every third Thursday for years.
I asked what she had been doing there. The woman said at first it was just coffee, then groceries, then whatever was needed, and eventually my mother started bringing an envelope every month. She said the woman inside had been sick for a long time and my mother had promised never to tell the family about her. I asked who was sick. She pointed toward the back bedroom. I walked in and found an elderly woman sitting beside the window with a blanket over her legs. She looked at me and immediately started crying. Then she said, “Your mother told me you’d come when she couldn’t anymore.”
I asked what my mother had been hiding. The woman reached into a drawer and pulled out a stack of envelopes tied with string. Every one was dated for a third Thursday. The earliest was from 1998. Inside the first envelope was a photograph of my mother holding a newborn baby. I knew the blanket, the hospital room, even the dress my mother was wearing. I asked whose baby it was. The woman looked at me for a long time and said, “Your brother.”
