Because underneath where the felt lining had lifted, Earl had hidden a photograph of a woman who has my mother’s chin.
Her name is Roberta. She is fifty-nine years old, she lives in Valdosta, and she is my sister.
We went into the county’s care in 1974 when I was four and she was seven. I was placed with a family in Macon. She was not. That is the entire amount I have ever known, and I have said her name out loud in this house maybe a dozen times in twenty years, mostly at night, mostly when I’d had a glass of wine.
Under the felt there was a photograph, an index card with an address and a phone number on it, and a letter in a woman’s handwriting on lined paper.
Earl started looking in 2023. He did it out of the library in town because we don’t have a computer, with a woman there named Delphine who does genealogy for people, on Tuesday afternoons when I thought he was at the shop.
It took him nineteen months. Georgia sealed those records and there are ways around it and none of them are fast.
He found her in February. He wrote to her first, because he said he was not going to hand me a telephone number and a hope.
The letter in that box is her answer. She wrote it in March. She says she has been looking for me since 1998 and had my first name and nothing else.
And on the back of the photograph, in my husband’s handwriting:
“Deenie — the box is just a box. I got you your sister. Call her when you’re ready and not one day before.”
Two weeks later he had the stroke at the kitchen table and was gone before the ambulance made the turn onto our road.
And that box sat in the dark of my closet for eleven months because I thought it was a secondhand box from a man who couldn’t be bothered.
I called her on a Wednesday in the middle of the afternoon. I got about four words out.
She drove up in June. She has our mother’s chin and she takes her coffee the same way I do and she cried in my driveway before she was out of the car.
She had a photograph in her purse of the two of us on a porch step in 1973. I had never seen my own face that young.
She’s been up three times since. She sleeps in the back bedroom and she calls it her room now, and I let her, and it is.
The boots are by the door with the price tag still on them. Size eleven. Nobody in this house wears an eleven anymore.
He never got to see me open it. Nineteen months of Tuesdays and he never got to see my face.