On the back of the Polaroid, in the shaky hand of my father, were three lines in blue ballpoint. Jo Ellen Wiebe, 1118 Gulf Breeze Court, Sarasota. And under it, in the same trembling letters, Tell Nettie she has a sister. Tell her I never stopped looking. Tell her to forgive her mother, because her mother was afraid. I sat in the front seat of my car outside the dark fairgrounds, with the gate chain rattling in the wind, and read it until the words stopped being words.
I drove home and did not sleep. At dawn I climbed into the attic of the house where I was born, which I had not entered since my mother died, and I opened the old hatbox that my father kept next to the Christmas ornaments. I had looked in that box a hundred times as a girl and seen only a hat. This time I lifted the hat. Under it, folded in a pillowcase and perfectly clean, sat a small purple bear with a yellow bow tie, with a tag from the state fair of 1966.
I called a woman named Dixie Raines at the motel where she was staying. I told her I was driving to Florida. She said she would meet me there, and then she said something that made me sit down on the attic floor. She said my sister had never stopped waiting for the phone to ring. For fifty eight years, in a small house by the water, Jo Ellen had kept a pink princess phone on her kitchen table in case it was Hutchinson calling.
A father who cannot say a hard thing aloud may spend his whole life saying it with prizes, one small stuffed animal at a time.
I drove two days. I stopped in Memphis, in Montgomery, in a motel outside Tallahassee where I ate a cold sandwich and cried into a paper napkin. On the third morning I turned onto Gulf Breeze Court, a sandy street of small pastel houses with palm trees in the yards. The house at the end was yellow, with a ticket booth painted on the mailbox in red and gold. A gray haired woman in a straw hat was kneeling by the porch, pulling weeds. She looked up when my car door shut.
I do not know how to tell what that was like. She was seventy four years old, thin and brown as a pecan, with the forehead of my father and the mouth of my mother. She stood up slowly, dusting her knees, and we looked at each other across twenty feet of crushed shell. Then she said, in a voice so quiet that the wind almost took it, “Nettie.” Nobody had called me that since the day my father died. I could not move. I held out the purple bear.
She took it in both hands and pressed it against her face and made a sound I will carry until I die. We sat on her porch swing for six hours. She told me what I had never been told. In the summer of 1966, at fifteen, she had been expecting a baby. Our mother, who could not bear the shame in the town church, had planned to send her away to a home in Wichita and give the child to strangers. Jo Ellen had run to the fair that night rather than do it.
Our mother had stood in the kitchen the next morning and told our father that the girl had drowned in the Arkansas River. She told the pastor, the neighbors, the newspaper. A small stone was even placed in the church cemetery. Daddy had never believed it. He spent that autumn walking the riverbank with a flashlight, and the next September, he walked the midway, and he did not stop until he was ninety. He paid for news with bears, because he had nothing else to pay with.
The baby was a girl, Jo Ellen said, born in a trailer in Georgia in the spring of 1967. Her name was Annabel. She was fifty seven now and taught third grade in Sarasota, and she had three children of her own. At that moment, a car pulled into the drive, and a tall woman with the chin of my father stepped out, holding a casserole dish. Jo Ellen stood and wiped her eyes. “Annabel,” she said, “come meet your aunt. She brought your grandfather.”
I stayed in Florida for three weeks. I met my nieces, my grand nieces, and a small red haired boy who asked me if I knew how to win a stuffed animal. I told him my father had been the best at it in Kansas. When I left, Jo Ellen stood in the driveway with the purple bear on her hip, as though it were a child. She said she was coming to Hutchinson in September, for the state fair, her first time home in fifty eight years.
On the opening night, we walked the midway together, my sister and I, arm in arm, past the Ferris wheel and the funnel cake stands. At the ring game, I stopped. I put down a twenty dollar bill. The man handed me a ring, and my hand shook, just like my father. I missed. I missed again. On the sixth ring, I landed one on a green bottle, and the man gave me a huge pink bear. I walked straight out behind the trailers and handed it to a small girl in a carnival jacket.