The nursing home was called Mercy Gardens, a low brick building three blocks from my own house, on a street where I had walked my dog for twenty years. I parked in the visitor lot with my hands cold on the wheel. In my pocket was the brass key from the envelope, and the lavender letter, and the photograph of a baby in a hospital blanket. At the front desk I said the name that was written at the bottom of the page, and the receptionist, a young woman in pink scrubs, smiled. “Sister Mary Catherine?” she said. “Oh, she has been waiting for you for ten months.”
She sat in a room at the end of the hall, in a chair by the window, a tiny white haired woman in a blue cardigan with a small silver cross at her throat. Her hands were folded in her lap. When I came to the door she turned her head, and I knew her. I did not know how. She had my eyes, wide set and brown, and my crooked left eyebrow. “Francisco,” she said, in a voice like a violin string. “Come in. Let me look at you. I have been looking at you for sixty three years in my head.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. I could not speak. She reached over and put her hand against my cheek, and the skin was papery and warm, and I began to cry like a child. I am a big man, a locksmith, with forearms like fence posts, and I wept in front of a nun in a nursing home. She did not say a word. She just held my face. When I could finally breathe, she said, “I am so sorry. I have wanted to say that for sixty three years. I am so sorry that I left.”
Some locks stay shut for sixty years, and the key is often a mother who never stopped praying that her child would come to the door.
She told me the story slowly, over three afternoons. In March of 1961 she had been eighteen, the only daughter of Judge Walter Pryce, home from school on a snowy night. She had gone out to the car garage behind the house to find her father, and she had seen a man there, a young lawyer named Gerald Thorne, his shirt soaked with blood, standing over the body of a farmworker named Eusebio Ramos. The man had been struck by the car of Thorne on a county road. He was dead. Her father was washing the blood from the hands of Thorne with a garden hose.
“He told me I had seen nothing,” she said. “He said that Gerald would be a great man someday, that he would be a governor, and that I must be silent for the sake of my family. I was pregnant. I was not married. I was a child, Francisco, and I was afraid.” She looked out the window at the parking lot. “My father arranged everything. He sent me to the sisters in Kansas City. He arranged for you to go to the Delgados, who were good people and who wanted a child. I signed the papers. And I spent my life, my entire life, praying for you.”
I told her that Lupe Delgado had been a wonderful mother, strict and funny and generous, and that my father had taught me to fix everything I touched. Sister Mary Catherine closed her eyes and smiled. “I prayed for them too,” she said. “Every night. I begged God to let them love you.” She opened her eyes. “They did?” I said, “More than I deserved.” She nodded slowly. For some time we sat in the bright light of the window, and I held her hand, and the clock ticked on the wall, and it seemed that sixty three years collapsed into a single afternoon.
The brass key opened a safe deposit box at the First National Bank, in the name of Catherine Pryce, rented since 1989. Inside were her journals from the convent, a small leather purse that had belonged to Eusebio Ramos, and a handwritten statement dated 1961, signed by her, describing what she had seen. The judge had never known she kept it. Frank, she had told me, if I leave this world and no one has come, the key goes to my son. She had arranged it with a priest. The priest had been dead for fifteen years. She had not given up.
We searched for the family of Eusebio Ramos for two months. Gerald Thorne, who did become governor, had died in 1998 without ever being questioned. The judge was long dead. But a researcher at the Pueblo history museum found a granddaughter in Greeley, a nurse named Elena Ramos, who had grown up with a photograph of a grandfather she had never met. When I sat in her kitchen and put the purse on the table, she held it for a long time without speaking. Inside were a rosary, a pocketknife, and a pay stub from a beet farm.
Sister Mary Catherine came to Greeley with us in a wheelchair, in her blue cardigan, and she read her statement aloud to Elena in the kitchen. I will never forget the quiet in that room. At the end, my mother said, “I am sorry. I should have spoken sixty three years ago.” Elena took her hand and said, “You are speaking now.” The state attorney general later issued a formal acknowledgment of the death of Eusebio Ramos, and the county placed a marker at the side of the road, with his name and the date, in English and Spanish.
I moved my mother to a sunny room in a home with a garden, and I visit her every day. We play cards, a game she learned in the convent that has no name. She tells me about my grandmother, who sang in the kitchen. I tell her about my father, who whistled through his teeth. On Christmas Eve this year I made tamales, my first, using the recipe of Lupe from a grease stained card, and I brought a plate to my mother. She tasted one and smiled. “Good,” she said. “But a little too much salt.” She was right, and I wrote it down.