The birth certificate was brittle as a communion wafer. I carried it out of the freezer into the warehouse office, where the light was warm, and read it twice with Brock standing by the door. Baby girl, born March 3, 1966, Charity Hospital, New Orleans. Mother, Lorena Marie Guidry, age seventeen. Father, unknown. The name of the baby had been written by hand in faded blue ink, and then crossed out by somebody else, and a different name inked in below it. Marie Therese. The surname was a convent one, Sister of the Holy Cross.
Lorena had never told me. In forty nine years of marriage, she never said one word about a baby before me. I sat down at the old desk with its coffee rings and its peeling blotter. I thought of the way she used to stand at the dock at five in the morning, watching the trucks pull out, with her hand on her chest as if she were saying a prayer. I thought of how she always insisted on taking the Decatur Street route, even in the rain. Brock cleared his throat. “Mr. Thibodeaux, the envelope has a letter too. It says Alcide on the front.”
“Alcide, my love, if you are reading this, you have found my secret, and I am more afraid than I have ever been. I was seventeen. The sisters took the baby the day she was born, and my mother told me never to speak of it. I married you with this secret in my pocket, and I never found the courage to take it out. In 1979, our driver quit at Mardi Gras and I took his route myself. At a small oyster house on Decatur, a waitress carried a tray out to the truck. She had my chin. I knew it before I knew how I knew. I delivered ice to her for thirty years.”
An old ice man opens a frozen lockbox with a key he carried for forty-four years, and finds a daughter his wife loved quietly from a delivery truck.
I stopped reading. I could not see the page for a minute. I poured a cup of terrible office coffee and drank half of it, and then I went back to the letter. “Her name is Marie. She owns that restaurant now. She does not know who I am, and I could not bear to tell her and watch her turn away. So I sent her ice every Tuesday and a free bag of crushed ice with every order, and a praline from the Quarter in the bottom of the bag, the way you used to do for me on our first date. I just wanted to see her face. Forgive me.”
The letter ended with an address and a small gold key taped to the bottom. Not the key to the lockbox. The key to a safe deposit box at Whitney Bank, where Lorena had saved forty one thousand dollars in small bills, deposited over thirty years, in the name of Marie Therese Landry. Next to it lay a savings account book and a faded drawing of a boat made by a child. I sat in that office until the sun came up. Then I drove to the Quarter in my old truck and parked outside a little yellow restaurant on Decatur called the Yellow Oyster House.
Brock drove me to the bank himself, since my hands were too unsteady for my own truck. A teller in a green blazer led us to the vault and slid the long box from its slot. Inside lay forty years of savings bonds, a rosary, three Mardi Gras doubloons and a stack of Polaroids tied with a blue ribbon. Every photograph showed the same woman at different ages, always at a distance, always through a screen door or across a crowded restaurant. Lorena had kept a picture of her daughter for each year of the delivery route. The last one was taken three weeks before she passed.
She came to the back door in a white apron at six in the morning, a woman of fifty nine with silver at her temples and the chin of Lorena, and when she saw me, she smiled. “Mr. Thibodeaux! You never come to the kitchen yourself. Is something wrong with the ice?” I held out the birth certificate, and then I held out the letter, and I could not speak. She read slowly, standing in the doorway with her hand on the frame. Behind her, the line cooks stopped chopping. When she reached the end she folded the paper in half and held it against her heart.
“The ice lady,” she whispered. “She always left that praline. I used to eat it standing behind the walk in cooler so nobody would see me cry. I thought she was just kind.” I took off my cap. “She was your mother, Marie. She was kind because she loved you, and she was afraid of what that love would cost.” Marie wiped her eyes with her apron. “I looked for her my whole life,” she said. “The sisters told me my mother had been a little girl who could not keep me. They never said she came every Tuesday.”
Junior arrived at ten, in a pressed shirt and a very small voice. He had been the one inside the cold room, I learned, looking for the lockbox. Celeste had overheard Lorena mention a secret on her last visit to the hospital. They had hoped for money. I walked him over to the table where Marie sat, and I introduced them. Junior looked from her face to mine to the chin they shared, and all the blood left his cheeks. “Daddy,” he said. “She is my sister.” I said yes, and I said he owed her an apology and a lifetime of Tuesdays.
He gave the apology on his knees, in front of the lunch crowd, and Marie raised him by the elbow and hugged him as if he were four. The next week I sat all three of us down with a lawyer and divided what I had left into three equal parts, the house, the Kenner warehouse, and the money from the sale. I bought a window air conditioner for the shotgun house anyway, because Junior insisted, and a second fig tree. On Tuesdays now, I carry the ice myself to Decatur Street, with a praline in the bottom of the bag.