Lying on top of everything in the crushed blue suitcase was a wedding photograph, curled at the edges and spotted with mold, and under it a folded sheet of paper written in the round handwriting of my mother. I knelt on the dirt floor of that shed in my black funeral dress and unfolded it with fingers that would not stay still. Dewey stood by the door with his hat in his hands, and his three dogs sat in a row behind him like a jury. The first line read, Orrin, my sister Peg is dying in Pittsburgh and I am going to her for one month.
I read it out loud, because I could not make the words stay in my head otherwise. My mother, Lorraine, wrote that she had packed in a hurry after the call came on a Sunday night. She wrote that she would be back before the first of March, and that Orrin should tell Roxanne and Danny she loved them more than the world. She wrote that the bus left at six in the morning and that she would leave the suitcase on the porch only until she found a ride to the station. The letter ended with the address of her sister on Brighton Road.
I could not breathe for a moment. The woman who had left us for thirty three years, the woman I had cursed at every birthday, had not left at all. She had gone to sit with a dying sister, and somebody had made sure my father never read the note. Dewey cleared his throat and said quietly that he had always wondered about the second page. My father told him last month, he said, that the page had been stuck in the lining all these years, and that he finally found it with his own hands.
Sometimes the saddest thing about a buried secret is not what was hidden, but how long a good man believed the worst about the woman he loved.
The rest came out slowly over the next three days, in pieces, from Dewey and from the old people of our street. My uncle Wendell, the younger brother of my father, had lived in our back room in those years, drinking and borrowing and resenting my mother for saying no to him. He was the one who had found the suitcase on the porch that January morning. He put it in the truck, handed my father a short forged note saying she had gone off with another man, and told him to let her go.
My father believed him for one terrible night. Then he drove to the landfill at midnight with the suitcase, shaking, and asked Dewey to bury it, because he could not stand to have it in the house. By March he knew something was wrong, but my mother did not come home, and he was too proud to go looking. He did not learn until last month, when he finally dug the thing up and found the page, that Wendell had been telling both sides the opposite story the whole time.
I found the grave of my uncle Wendell in the cemetery behind the Lutheran church, a plain stone with weeds around it, and I stood there a long time. I did not pray. I only told him what I thought, in a low voice, until the sun started to go down. Then I walked to my car, pulled out my phone, and did the thing I had not done in thirty three years. I called information and asked for a Lorraine Pettit in the city of Pittsburgh, on Brighton Road.
There was no Lorraine Pettit. But there was a Lorraine Dacko, and the voice that answered on the fourth ring was older and softer than I remembered, and it still said hello the way she used to, with a little rise at the end. I said, “Mama?” The line went so quiet that I could hear a clock. Then she whispered my name, Roxie, and I heard something fall on the floor, and she began to weep.
She told me everything that night, until my battery ran low. She had come back in March and knocked on our door, and my uncle had answered and told her Orrin wanted her gone. She wrote to us for years. Every letter came back, or so she thought, until she gave up. She had never remarried. She had worked at a hospital laundry and kept a drawer full of birthday cards for two children, one for every year, unsigned, unsent, in case she ever got the chance.
My brother Danny and I drove to Pittsburgh that weekend, six hours with the radio off and neither of us speaking. She was waiting on the front step of a narrow brick house, small and white haired, holding a dish towel in both hands. I did not say a word. I walked up the steps and put my arms around her, and she smelled of lavender soap and fried onions, exactly like the kitchen of my girlhood.
We buried my father in May, but we did not truly say goodbye to him until June, when my mother came to Hagerstown for the first time in thirty three years. She stood at his grave in a gray coat with her hand on the stone. She said, “You foolish man. You dug for me the whole time.” Then she laid the wedding photograph on the grass, and the three of us stood together, and it started, quietly, to rain.