Colleen went white as the pillowcase. “Mom,” she said, “where did you get that?” I held out the letter of Frank. “Read it,” I said. “Your father wanted you to read this one before you opened your own.” She took it with a trembling hand and sat down on the end of the new bed, which sighed under her like a tired animal. As she read, I watched her lips move over the name of Walsh, and the date in March, and the name of the woman. When she reached the last line, she did not look up.
Frank had written it all down in his careful hand. The woman who had walked into the office of Walsh with my daughter was named Vickie Dunne. She ran a “real estate freedom” seminar in Philadelphia that charged forty thousand dollars for a membership, and she promised each member a house of their own in exchange for “moving the family property into the right hands.” Frank had added, at the bottom of the page: “Our girl is not wicked, Peg. She is lonely, and she has been in debt since the divorce. Vickie found her. Be gentle.”
“I owed sixty one thousand dollars on cards,” Colleen said, and her voice broke on the number. “After Rob left, I could not make the payments. Vickie said the house was worth three hundred ten thousand, and that you were, she said, slipping. She said it was not stealing if it was only getting ahead of the problem.” She pressed a fist to her mouth. “The new bed was part of it. She told me to stage your room before the appraiser came. I told myself I was protecting you. That is the lie we tell ourselves.”
A man who builds with his hands leaves behind a hollow place, and fills it with the words he never had time to say.
She picked up the small envelope sealed with red wax and turned it over twice. Then she cracked the seal with her thumbnail, and her face crumpled before she had read a word. The page inside was short. She read it aloud in a thin voice. “Colleen, my girl. If you are reading this, then you did what I feared, and your mother read mine first, so she knows what I know. I am not angry. I am only sad. I made your crib from this same maple. The house goes to your mother for her life, and then to you and your children, and no one can sell it without both signatures. I built it so you would never need anyones scheme.”
“Come home to us, Colleen,” she read. “The door is not locked.” She dropped the page and folded forward into my arms, and I held her the way I had held her in the winter of 1971 when she had the croup and would not sleep. She was fifty three years old, a bookkeeper with gray in her hair, and she shook like a child. “I was so ashamed, Mom,” she kept saying. “I was so ashamed.” I stroked her back. “I know, baby,” I said. “Your father knew it too. That is why he wrote the letter in the first place.”
On Monday morning we sat in the old office of Walsh on Spruce Street, a narrow room that smelled of pipe tobacco and lemon oil. The attorney, a courtly man of eighty with a bow tie, took out a thick file and set it on the desk. He had kept every note. He had also reported Vickie Dunne to the Pennsylvania attorney general two years earlier, and the investigation was still open. Colleen gave a sworn statement, her hands steady, and she cancelled her membership in writing. The attorney general later recovered a part of her money.
The rest I learned from Danny, the young man from the delivery truck, who telephoned on Tuesday to ask if I was all right. “Mrs. Doyle,” he said, “I never took your frame to the dump. When I heard your voice on the phone, I could not do it. I numbered all the pieces with chalk and put them in my garage.” I could not speak for a moment. “Danny,” I said at last, “you are an angel with a work truck.” He laughed, embarrassed, and said that the headboard was the prettiest thing he had ever seen.
On Saturday, Danny and his brother arrived with the pieces in the back of a pickup, and Colleen and I stood on the sidewalk like children waiting for a parade. We carried the bed into the bedroom one section at a time. Danny read the numbers off the chalk marks, and the joints slid together with a satisfied sound, wood into wood, the way Frank always said they would. By noon the bed stood in its old place by the window, solid and tall and a little proud.
When Colleen got down on her knees to tighten the last bolt, she called out, “Mom, there is something carved under the footboard.” I got down beside her, which took some doing. There on the underside, hidden from every eye but a childs, was a third small heart, no bigger than a thumbnail, with the letters CD cut into it. “For the baby who came two years later,” I whispered. “He told me he was going to do it and I forgot.” Colleen put her cheek against the wood and stayed there a long minute.
She sold her condominium in the spring and moved into the room at the top of the stairs, the one with the slanted ceiling and the window over the maple tree. The remote controlled bed went to the church shelter, where a young mother with two boys sleeps on it now and sends me a card each month. Colleen pays her debts, a little at a time, with a hopeful bookkeepers patience. We eat supper together every night. She does the dishes, and I tell her the stories of her father that I forgot to tell her when she was small.
At night I lie on my own side of the maple bed, the way I have for fifty nine years, and the old frame creaks the soft low creak that my daughter once wanted to silence. Now it is the sound of a house keeping a promise. Before she goes to sleep Colleen comes in to say goodnight, and she sits on the side that belonged to Frank, and we count the hearts together, by the light of the hallway lamp. One for me. One for him. And one, tucked underneath, for the child who came home.