I opened the top one at the table. When I read the first line of what my grandmother had hidden in that sideboard all those years, I had to put it down, because it started with the words My darling girl, you turned nine today and I made your cake anyway.
Sixty-one letters. One a year, every year, on the eleventh of April, from 1953 to 2013.
Not one of them has a stamp. All of them are addressed the same way, to a name none of us had ever heard, in care of a Catholic charities office in Wilkes-Barre that closed in 1971.
My grandmother had a daughter in 1952. She was nineteen and unmarried and she was sent to her aunt’s for six months, which is what that meant then, and the baby was placed and she came home and everybody in that family agreed to behave as though nothing had occurred.
She married my grandfather in 1955. She had four more children. She kept her good china in that sideboard for sixty years and never once let a grandchild open the low doors on the end.
The letters are not sad, mostly. That is the thing that undid me. They are ordinary. She tells this girl about the garden. About my father falling off a fence in 1968 and needing stitches. She apologizes for a haircut she gave one of her sons. She writes about the moon landing, and about a bad winter, and one year the whole letter is about a dog.
She was raising a daughter in her head for sixty-one years and telling her about the family she was not in.
The last one, from 2013, when her handwriting had gone bad and she was eighty, is four lines.
I am running out of Aprils. I never sent one of these because I was told you had a good family and I was afraid I would take something from you. If somebody finds these and you are still living, that fear is theirs now, not mine. I have carried it long enough.
She is still living.
Her name is Margaret and she is seventy-three and she lives outside Tacoma, and she was adopted by a schoolteacher and a mill foreman and she says she had a good childhood and she is not lying to be kind, I have met her now and she means it.
She had looked. Twice, in 1994 and again in 2007, and the second time she got as far as a name and stopped, because she was afraid of exactly the same thing my grandmother was afraid of.
Two women spent forty years being frightened of taking something from each other, and the whole time there were sixty-one letters in a sideboard.
She came out in September. My aunts met her at the airport and one of them nearly fell down, because Margaret has my grandmother’s hands and she does the same thing with them when she is nervous.
We gave her the letters, all of them, in the order they were written.
She is reading them one a week. She says she does not want to run out.