Love,
Candice (your mom)
I swallowed hard. Her words trampled my head and annihilated my heart. At first, I didn’t understand where she was coming from. I felt manipulated, framed, and used. How dare she call me her daughter and pray for my forgiveness? She didn’t deserve anything from me. It was going to take a lot more than just a card on my 18th birthday to convince me that she’d earned the right to have a relationship with me. But then I looked back down at her words and started to feel the pain in her tone and through her scribbly handwriting. The smeared letters seemed to be doused with tear drops. And there was that one sentence where she confessed to writing the same thing in every birthday card. Every? I’ve only gotten this one.
“Holy f’ing shit, Wilson, she wants a relationship with you,” Joanie said as we looked at each other. Her eyes were wide, her face drained of any color, and her lips curved as if they were at the point of deciding whether to smile or not.
“What the hell, J. She said she’s sent me other birthday cards. I’ve never gotten a fucking thing from her. She never sent me pictures, letters, cards, or presents on my birthday….nothing!” I steamed as my chest began to rise with each deliberate breath I took.
“I know, what the hell is she saying about birthday cards?” Joanie wondered as she took the letter and started going back over the words Candi had written.
“Do you think your grandparents wouldn’t let you have them?” Joanie said, her tone low, serious, and without any sense of light.
“How? Why? When?” I asked in rapid succession.
“Well, I don’t know. Did you ever pick up the mail?” Joanie asked.
“No, most of the time I was gone at school, so I didn’t really put much thought into it,” I said.
“You never got the mail? Never waited for a letter from a friend or a package you were expecting? Nothing?” Joanie questioned. I watched her whole body change to disbelief.
“No, I didn’t really think about it, J. They’d get the mail and hand me my letters,” I said, feeling totally stupid.
“What if they were keeping Candi’s letters from you?” Joanie posed, creating a frenzied nervousness in my gut.
I got up and paced the cold hardwood floor. If they did that, if they didn’t let me see any of the letters and cards Candi sent, where would they have put them? Grams and Gramps wouldn’t do that…but then again, they knew she was a loser and they wanted to protect me.
“They wouldn’t do that,” I vocalized my thoughts, pacing back and forth.
“Well, let’s just assume for a minute that they did…where do you think they’d keep ’em?”
“J, hell, I don’t know; in their dressers? Maybe under their bed?” I suggested as Joanie hoped off and dropped to the floor, pulling up the beige country lace bed skirt.
“We should look for a box, maybe even a couple of them. Assuming Candi wrote you every birthday and major holiday, it could be a pretty big box,” Joanie said, muffled with half her body lodged under my grandparents’ bed. “I don’t see anything under here that has letters in it.”
I started to react to Joanie’s frantic need to find a box that may or may not exist. My skin started to perspire and my heart didn’t help out when it began to thrash in my chest. I had to shake my hands out as I paced. The blood seemed to refuse to circulate into my hands and feet. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself opening the top drawer of my grandma’s dresser. I shuffled through what little was left from my grandfather going through her things after she died. It was mainly things that gave him a moment to feel her—her favorite scarf, a hat she always wore when they walked on the beach, and a pair of wool socks with a broach made from ivory wrapped down in the toe. No letters, no unopened envelopes. Every dresser drawer I opened revealed the same thing, just some odd items that must have held some sort of special meaning to my grandpa. His world, wrapped up and shoved in an old wooden dresser that smelled of cedar and Woolite.
“What if they threw them out?” I asked Joanie.
“Check your grandpa’s dresser,” she said as she pulled another box out from under the bed and pulled the lid off.
I hesitated just before pulling the handle on his dresser. I’d never gone through his drawers before. This was my gramps, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know if I was ready to find parts of his life that I had never been privy to. Cufflinks and cologne were one thing; I didn’t know if I wanted to get real personal with his underwear drawer. What if there were things in there that would burst the bubble he’d been protected by for most of my life? What if I found out he’s only human? I know that sounds stupid and childish, but there was something about my grandpa that made him a notch above human for me.