The caseworker who answered the telephone was named Denise Morrow, and when I said the name of my mother she stopped talking for what felt like a minute. “Oh,” she finally said. “Oh, honey. We always wondered who she was. She signed the cards only Grandma G. We never had a last name.” I told her it was Gertrude Pelletier, that she had been ninety years old and unable to leave her third floor apartment in Fresno for six years, and that I had just found three dozen wrapped presents in her closet.
“She did not do it alone,” Denise said. “Every month she mailed us a list and a money order. A young man who lives in your building picks up the gifts from the store and brings them to her. She wraps them herself, with her hands, and he mails them to the foster families. She told him not to tell anyone.” I thought of the pharmacy boy named Marcus who delivered her prescriptions. He had come to the funeral, standing at the back in his work vest, with his cap in his hands, and I had not understood why.
I drove to the county office that afternoon with a laundry basket of presents. Denise met me in the lobby, a tall woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain, and she led me to a conference room where a wall of corkboard held index cards with names and dates. “Every child in foster care in this county who is not on a family list,” she said. “Your mother made sure that none of them missed a birthday. Dominic has his ninth next Saturday. I would like you to be there when he opens his.”
A childhood without kindness can make an adult who spends a lifetime making sure no one else goes without.
I learned the reason that night, from a shoebox on the top shelf. My mother had grown up in a state home in Ohio in the 1940s. Her own mother had died of tuberculosis when she was five, and for the next eleven years she had passed through four institutions and two foster houses. She never once received a gift on her birthday. In the shoebox was a faded postcard that she had saved all her life, from a nun who had written, simply, “Happy birthday, Gertie. Someone remembered.”
On Saturday I went to a small apartment on the east side of town where a foster mother named Yolanda had baked a sheet cake and hung a banner. Dominic was a skinny boy with a gap in his teeth who stood at the edge of the room and would not come closer. I knelt and handed him the package wrapped in blue paper. The tag said, Dominic, turning 9. He turned it over, and over, and read the tag twice. “Who is Grandma G?” he whispered. “Is she coming?”
I told him the truth, because he deserved it, and because a child who has been lied to by adults all his life can smell a lie from across a room. I said that Grandma G was a very old woman who had loved him from far away, and that she had died last month, and that she had wanted him to have this. He was quiet. Then he tore the paper with both hands, and inside was a set of colored pencils and a sketchbook, and he started to cry, and so did I.
I went home that night and sat in the empty apartment of my mother, among her fabric scraps and the ribbon and the tape. I looked at the pile of gifts still in the closet, forty one of them, with birthdays running through the winter. I thought about the fifteen years that she had done this by herself, a ninety year old woman with arthritic fingers wrapping paper at a card table. I thought about how much of it I had missed, living across town, coming on Sundays for an hour.
So I took over. I am a bookkeeper, not a saint, and I have no particular gift for it, but I know how to follow a list. I called Marcus and asked if he would keep delivering the gifts to me, and he said he would be honored. Denise sent the new names every month. I wrapped the presents on my kitchen table, badly, with too much tape, and signed every card the same way. Grandma G. The children, I learned, had never needed more than that.
In the spring the county asked if I would speak at the annual foster family picnic. I stood in a park in front of three hundred people and told them the story of Gertrude Pelletier. I did not say much. I said that a woman who had once been a child no one remembered had decided that no child would be forgotten again. A girl of about eleven came up afterward and handed me a drawing of an old lady with white hair and a big bow. Under it she had written, in crayon: Thank you, Grandma G.
There are two hundred and six children on the list now, and I wrap about thirty presents a month. Marcus helps, and so does Denise, and two women from the church, and my sister, who flew in from Denver to see what the fuss was about and has not gone home. We call ourselves the Closet. On the wall of the apartment of my mother, which I could not bring myself to give up, hangs the postcard from the nun, framed, with a new line beneath it in my handwriting: Someone remembered.