My mother. The second box was in the name of my mother, and she has been gone since 2021.
I did not know she had a box. She never told anybody. She rented it in 1977 and paid for it every year for forty four years.
The manager, whose name was Denise, printed both closure records and handed them to me, and then she said something I will never forget. She said that license was expired. The bank should never have accepted it. That was their mistake, not mine, and she was going to make sure somebody fixed it.
I went to the police that afternoon. The detective asked me one question first. Where did I lose the license?
I thought about it. And then my stomach dropped. I lost it in the parking lot of the church, the day we buried my mother.
Somebody at that funeral knew her maiden name. Somebody knew the last four of my social. Somebody knew about the boxes.
It took the detective three weeks. The bank had video from that afternoon in 2022. I knew her the second I saw her. It was my cousin Donna. She had helped my mother with her bills that last year. She had seen every statement.
She stood beside me at the graveside, and then she picked up my license from the gravel on her way to the car.
She confessed when they showed her the video. She had been drowning in debt. She sold the rings that belonged to my grandmother from my box to a jeweler in the next county. The detective recovered two of the three. The bank paid me for the third, and for every rental fee I paid on a box I did not have.
But the box that mattered was the other one. Donna had not sold anything from it. She said she opened it, saw what was inside, and could not bring herself to touch it. She kept it in her closet for four years.
The detective brought it to my house in an evidence bag.
Inside were baby clothes. Mine. A hospital bracelet with my name. A lock of hair in a little envelope. And a stack of letters, one for every birthday of my life, every one of them addressed to me and never mailed.
My mother was not a talker. She never said I love you much. I always thought that was just how she was.
Fifty five letters. She said it in every single one of them. She just could not say it out loud.
I read one a night for fifty five nights. I cried at most of them. I laughed at some. The one from my sixteenth birthday apologizes for grounding me over the car, and admits she did the exact same thing at my age.
Donna pleaded guilty. The judge gave her probation and restitution. I asked him to. She wrote me a letter too, apologizing. I have not answered it yet. I might.
I rented a new box. Same bank. Denise set it up herself. The letters are in it now, and my own letters to my kids are starting to go in beside them.