Part 3 — Behind The Sleeve
I set my pry bar down because my flashlight had landed on a cedar box. It sat in the middle of the little compartment on a folded linen cloth, as neat as a jewelry box in a shop window.
Nothing in there was dangerous. Nothing was frightening. It was only that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide something very dear.
I called the homeowners, a young couple named Priya and Ben, and asked them to come in from the other room. I did not touch the box until they were standing beside me.
Inside were eleven letters tied with kitchen twine, a pair of tiny knitted baby booties, and a card in faded blue ink. To whoever repairs this wall: please be gentle with what is inside.
The letters were all addressed to the same name. Dear Annie. Each one was dated on her birthday, from 1962 to 1972, and signed Mama.
The woman who wrote them was Dolores Whitcomb, who had lived in that house until 1974. She had hidden them because her husband did not like to talk about their daughter, who had gone to live with an aunt in another state.
Priya found the county records the next morning. The deed trail led to a daughter named Ann Whitcomb Reyes, now seventy-one, living in San Antonio.
There is a plain rule about found property inside a home. It belongs to the owner of the house, and the owner can decide to give it back. Priya and Ben did not hesitate.
They wrote to Annie. A week later she called, and I happened to be on the porch finishing the new unit. I heard Priya cry as she listened.
Annie drove in that weekend, a small woman with silver hair and her mothers way of tilting her head. She sat on the front step and read the first letter aloud, and then the second, and then she stopped, because she could not go on.
Her aunt had told her, long ago, that her mother had not written. All those years, she had believed it.
A mother can love her child across fifty years of silence, and a plain wall can keep that love safe until someone is kind enough to open it.
I finished the air conditioner that afternoon and did not charge them for the extra hour. Before she left, Annie pressed the little booties into my palm, then closed my fingers around them. “Hold them one second,” she said. “She would have liked you.”