The clerk at the Hall County courthouse in Grand Island was a woman of fifty named Dorene, who had gone to my mother Sunday school and who had always been fond of me. She took the card from my hand, read the second name on the signature line, and typed it into her computer. I watched her face change. She went pale, and then pink, and then she put one hand to her chest and said in a whisper, “Karen, honey, sit down. I am going to print something. I need to get my supervisor.” I did not sit. I leaned on the counter and waited, listening to the clock.
The name under the signature of my mother was Elizabeth Ann Albrecht. Beth. I had not heard anyone say her name aloud in thirty nine years. She was my older sister, the golden one, the singer, the girl with the long red braid who played the piano at church. When I was twelve, she had gone to live with an aunt in California for her health, and I was told she had died of a fever the following spring. There was a small funeral. There was a closed box. My mother had not cried at all, and I thought it was because she was strong.
The document the clerk printed was a certified copy of a birth record, dated June 4, 1983, at a Catholic hospital in Omaha. Mother, Elizabeth Ann Albrecht, age seventeen. Father, unknown. Infant, male. Name given, David Michael. And below, in the box for remarks, a line in a hospital clerk neat typing. Mother deceased following delivery. Infant surrendered to Boys Town by grandmother. I stood in the courthouse corridor and read it three times. My knees went out, and Dorene caught me, and brought me a paper cup of water, and held my hand.
I called David from the car. He was at the motel on Highway 30, waiting, he said, with his hands on the steering wheel of a rental, not knowing whether to leave or stay. I read him the record. He said nothing at all for a very long time. Then, in a voice that cracked down the middle, he said, “She was my mother. And your mother was my grandmother.” I said yes. He said, “So you are my aunt.” I said yes again, and then, because I could not help it, I started to laugh, and so did he, the two of us weeping and laughing through a cell phone.
A promise made over a cradle can last a lifetime, and be kept in twenty dollar bills and three lines of handwriting every June.
I drove to the motel and found him standing in the parking lot in the sun, tall and gray at the temples, with the face of my sister. It was Beth, in the set of the eyes, in the way he held his shoulders. I walked straight up to him and put my arms around his waist. He bent down and held me, and I felt a strange quiet come over both of us. I had a nephew. For fifty years he had been four hours away in Omaha, and I had not known. We sat on the curb and ate french fries from a paper bag.
We read the card together, then, the one my mother had written on the day he was born. I had opened it in the car. Dear little David, it began. Today you came into the world, and your mother left it. She loved you more than anything. She asked me to keep you safe, and I cannot, because your grandfather will not allow it in the house, and I am too weak to defy him. I am sending you to a place where you will be raised with kindness. I will send you a birthday card every year. You will never be forgotten, as long as I live.
There were three lines beneath, in the hand of my mother at forty five. I am sorry. I love you. Your mother was named Beth. I read it over his shoulder, and I thought of how she had sat at the kitchen table every June with her Hallmark card and her twenty dollar bill. She had not been sending money to a stranger. She had been keeping a vow at the grave of her daughter. And after my father died, in the years when money was tight, she had never once missed. She had sat with her secret for thirty two years and told no one, not even me.
“Why did she stop in 2015?” David asked. I had wondered the same. It was Dorene, the clerk, who gave me the answer when I called her to thank her. In 2015, she said, my mother had come into the courthouse and registered a letter in a sealed file, to be released at her death. That was the year she had her first stroke. She had been afraid she might say something wrong, or forget. She had arranged for David to be told, and she had sent for him one last time, in the only way she could. A funeral invitation, tucked in a birthday card.
We buried Beth, in the end. The family plot has her name now, Elizabeth Ann Albrecht, 1966 to 1983, beloved daughter and sister and mother. The stone was set in June, on the fourth. David stood on one side of me and his wife on the other. Their two sons, my great nephews, stood at the back in their first suits. We sang her favorite hymn. When it was over, David took a card from his breast pocket and laid it on the grass. It was blank except for one line. For my mother. Somebody remembers.
He sends me a card every June now, with a twenty dollar bill folded neatly inside. I send one back to him on the same day. We do not need the money, either of us, but it has become a ritual, a thread between two houses. Last year he included a photograph of his sons in matching ball caps. On the back, in the cramped hand of a man who has learned to write by himself, he had put three lines. I am here. I love you. Thank you for remembering.