Birthday. She was going to say birthday. The same date was written in the front of the family Bible we keep on our mantel, the one my husband Dale has looked at every Christmas of his life. March 9, 1961.
I asked her to follow me back to the house. I did not know what else to do.
Her name was Marlene. She sat at my kitchen table with that box of westerns in her lap and told me what her mother told her before she died. In 1960 her mother was seventeen, unmarried, and working at a diner outside Bowling Green. Her family would not let her keep the baby. A farm couple from our county, a man who drove through for cattle sales and his wife who could not have children, took him home the week he was born. No agency. No papers. Just a handshake and a promise that he would be loved.
Her mother gave them two things to go with him. Her own green Bible, with his name and birthday written in it. And a box of her westerns, because she read them every night while she was carrying him and wanted him to have something of hers. She asked them to give him the box when he was grown.
They never did. They must have been afraid. So the box sat in a barn for sixty years, and the name and birthday got copied into our Bible as if he was born to them.
Dale came in from the shop while she was talking. He stood in the doorway a long time. Then he sat down across from her and said he always wondered why there were no baby pictures of him before he was a week old.
Marlene opened the paperback with the red horse on the cover. Folded inside was a letter, pencil on diner order paper, dated the week he was born. It started with the words, my sweet boy, I hope someday you read this and know I did not want to let you go.
Dale read it twice. He is not a crier. He cried.
They did one of those DNA kits from Walmart to be certain. Six weeks later it came back. Half siblings. Marlene was born four years after him, after her mother married.
That spring Dale drove to Kentucky for the first time in his life and stood at the grave of the woman who wrote that letter. Marlene took him to the diner, which is a Dollar General now. He bought a Coke there anyway.
The westerns are on a shelf in our living room now, all forty one of them. Dale is reading them in order, one a week, the same ones his mother read while she was carrying him. He says he can tell which pages she liked because the corners are folded down.
Marlene comes for Thanksgiving. She sits next to him. They have the same laugh, and I cannot believe I never heard it before.
Eleven thousand dollars for a box of paperbacks. The auctioneer thought it was a joke. It was the best money anybody ever spent in that barn.