My girlfriend is twenty years older than me, and on our second date she laughed when I told her where I grew up. “Never been there, hon. Couldn’t find it on a map.” On the night she turned forty-seven I dropped my phone down the crack of her sofa, and what came up with it had my dead mother’s face printed on the front.
I was twenty-seven when we matched.
Ileana was forty-six, and she messaged first, mostly to complain that my profile picture was blurry.
I almost didn’t answer. I’d had a year of women who canceled an hour before and guys at work telling me to lower my standards.
We met at a diner at nine on a Tuesday night, because she opened a bakery at five and that was the only hour she had.
We stayed until the waitress started mopping around our booth.
She asked questions and actually waited for the answers.
She remembered I hated cilantro after hearing it one time.
My buddy Jackson called her “the cougar” for about a month. Then he met her at a cookout and she beat him at cornhole three games straight, and he shut up about it.
By spring I had a toothbrush at her place and a drawer I wasn’t allowed to call a drawer.
I’ll just say it. I was in love with her.
Three weeks before her birthday we ducked into a pawn shop to get out of the rain.
She stopped at the glass case and asked the guy to see a pair of green stone earrings.
She held one up to her ear in the little mirror on the counter.
“Six hundred and forty dollars,” she said, and handed it back. “For something some other woman had to give up. No thanks.”
But she looked in that mirror a second longer than she needed to.
I went back the next Saturday and put a deposit down.
I picked up extra hours at the warehouse. I skipped Jackson’s fantasy draft. I ate a lot of ramen.
On her birthday I set the little box next to her plate.
She opened it and put both hands over her mouth.
“You went BACK for them?”
“I went back four times,” I said. “The guy knows my name now.”
She laughed and kissed me hard and carried the box down the hall to the bathroom to put them in properly.
I sat on her sofa, this old brown sectional she wouldn’t get rid of because it had been her grandmother’s, and got my phone out so I could take her picture when she came back.
It slid right out of my hand.
Straight down the crack beside the arm cushion.
I went in after it up to the elbow.
A hair tie. Two pennies. A pen cap chewed flat. A popcorn kernel that had probably been down there since 2019.
Then the phone, and pinched against it, a piece of folded card stock.
I almost tossed it on the coffee table.
Then I saw the face.
Short dark hair. That big open laugh. A little gold cross I’d know anywhere, because it’s in a box in my closet right now.
My mother.
It was the program from her funeral.
Eleven years ago in Chillicothe I stood at the church door and handed out maybe two hundred of these, because my dad couldn’t stand up long enough to do it.
I was sixteen.
And Ileana had sat across from me in that diner and told me she had NEVER been there.
My hands wouldn’t do anything.
Maybe somebody gave it to her. Maybe it came with the couch. Maybe there were two women named Dawn Rausch who died in March of 2015 wearing the same cross.
I opened it.
The order of service. The poem my aunt picked out. I read that poem so many times that week I still know it.
But under the poem, across the bottom, somebody had written in blue ink.
Three lines. Leaning hard to the right.
I knew that lean. It was on every birthday card I got until I was eighteen.
It was MY FATHER’S HANDWRITING.
And the first word of it was her name.
Down the hall the water shut off.
“Seth? Don’t you dare look yet,” Ileana said. “I want to see your face when I walk in.”
I didn’t say anything.
I read the rest of the first line. Then I read it again, because the first time it made no sense, and the second time it made too much.
The bathroom door opened.
She came down the hall in her green dress with my earrings in, smiling.
Then she saw what was in my hands.
The smile just went.
She stopped at the end of the hallway with one hand still up by her ear.
“Where did you get that,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“YOUR COUCH, Ileana.”
“Seth.”
“You said you’d never been there. You said you couldn’t find it on a map.”
She didn’t come any closer.
She looked at the paper. Then at the front door. Then at me.
“Have you called your dad yet?” she said.
“Why the hell would I call my dad?”
She sat down on the arm of the chair across from me, slow, like her knees had made the call for her.
“Because you need to hear it from me first,” she said. “Not from whatever Richard wrote on that. FROM ME.”
Then she took one earring out and set it on the table between us.
Blue ink
I looked down at the program again, because I couldn’t look at her.
Ileana. I told you not to come today.
Leave before the cemetery. One year, and I’m yours.
Don’t make me wait longer than that. R.
That was all of it. Three lines and his initial, the R with the loop he puts on everything, the same R that’s on the mailbox at home.
The earring sat next to the cake knife. There was still frosting on the blade.
“He wrote this to you,” I said. “At her funeral.”
“In the hallway by the coat rack. He used my knee to lean on.”
“I didn’t ask where.”
“I know.” She pressed her thumb against her bare earlobe. “But he didn’t hand it to me, Seth. He just wrote on it. You handed it to me.”
I turned the program over. My mother laughed up at me from the front.
“You were at the door,” Ileana said. “You had them stacked against your chest like a paperboy. Your tie was too short. You handed me one and you said, ‘Thank you for coming.'”
She put her hand back up by her ear, like the earring was still there.
“That’s what you said to me. ‘Thank you for coming.'”
Easter, in the garage
My dad is Richard Rausch. He’s sixty-three. He never remarried and never dated that I know of.
Mom’s reading glasses have been on the windowsill over the kitchen sink for eleven years. He dusts around them.
On the day of the funeral, my aunt Marjorie, Mom’s sister, came out of a side room at the church with a stack of programs and put them in my arms.
“Your father’s sitting down in the back, honey,” she said. “He can’t do this. You can.”
So I did. I stood at the door for an hour and a half and said thank you for coming to every single person, and I was proud of it. I’ve been proud of it for eleven years.
Every March since, on the weekend Mom died, Dad drives up to the lake by himself. He leaves Friday after work and comes back Sunday night quiet, and you don’t ask him anything that week. I never did. I figured that was his grief, and I left him alone with it.
Then this Easter I went home for dinner and showed him a picture of Ileana on my phone.
It was her behind the counter at the bakery with flour on her forehead, pointing at the camera like she was going to kill me for taking it.
Dad took the phone out of my hand and looked at it a long time.
“What’s her last name?” he said.
I told him.
“What town?”
I told him that too.
He handed my phone back and went out to the garage. I heard the air compressor kick on and run. He didn’t have anything to fill. It ran for forty minutes.
When he came back in he washed his hands at the sink, right next to Mom’s glasses, and said, “She looks like a nice lady, Seth.”
After that he started calling on Sunday nights. He’d never called on Sunday nights. “You still seeing the baker?” Every week.
The week after Easter I carried Ileana’s mail in from the box. A pizza coupon, the electric bill and a hand-addressed envelope, no return address. She took the envelope out of my hand before I’d let go of it. She put it in her apron pocket and burned the grilled cheese, and she said it was from her sister.
I sat on her grandmother’s sectional with my mother’s face in my lap and thought about my dad’s lake.
The lake, he always called it. In eleven years he never once said which one.
Aunt Marjorie
“How long,” I said.
Ileana didn’t make me ask it twice.
“I was thirty-five,” she said. “I worked the early shift at a donut place on the edge of town. Your town. He came in every morning at six for two crullers and a large coffee, and one morning he stayed.”
“Every morning.”
“He told me his wife was living at her sister’s. He told me they were done and the paperwork was slow.” She looked at the program. “I believed him because I wanted to.”
My mother was in a hospital bed in our living room that whole last year. We moved the couch into the garage to fit it. Aunt Marjorie came every afternoon so Dad could go to work.
Dad went to work at six.
“I read the obituary in the paper behind the counter,” Ileana said. “I didn’t know she was sick. I swear to God, Seth, I didn’t know she was even home. I went to the church because I had to see it was real.”
I got up. I went out on her porch with my phone and stood under the light with the bugs.
I didn’t call my dad. I called Aunt Marjorie.
She picked up on the fourth ring with the TV going. Wheel of Fortune, from the sound of it. She asked if I was eating, because she always asks if I’m eating.
“I’ve got Mom’s program in my hand,” I said. “There’s writing on it. Dad’s writing. To a woman named Ileana.”
The TV went off.
She didn’t ask who Ileana was.
She didn’t ask what it said.
“Where are you?” she said.
“At her house.”
I heard her breathe out through her nose, the way Mom used to before she said no to something.
“Honey, you throw that thing in the trash,” Marjorie said. “And don’t you call your father tonight. You hear me? Promise me you won’t call him tonight.”
The April envelope
When I came back in, Ileana wasn’t on the arm of the chair anymore. She was coming out of her bedroom with an envelope.
The one from her apron pocket. I knew it by the coffee ring on the corner.
She set it on the table next to the earring.
Blue ink. Leaning hard to the right. Postmarked Chillicothe, April 8. Three days after Easter.
Inside was one sheet off one of the yellow legal pads he keeps by the phone at home.
He’s my son. You end it before your birthday or I tell him exactly what you were to me. And I tell him you knew who he was. I’ll come up on the day to make sure. R.
I read it standing up. I read the part about the birthday twice.
“You knew who I was,” I said.
“Not when I messaged you. Your picture was a blur. You were Seth, twenty-seven, likes fishing, hates his job.” She almost laughed. “Half the men on there.”
“When.”
“Our second date. You said Chillicothe. Then you said your mom died in March when you were sixteen, and you said your last name to the waitress for the pie to go.”
That laugh at the diner. “Never been there, hon.” I’d thought it was cute.
“I laughed because I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I should have gotten up and left the booth. I didn’t. And every week after that I said next week. Then it was spring. Then you had a toothbrush here.”
“Seven months,” I said.
“I was going to tell you tonight. After the cake. I had it out on the couch and you came in early with the box and I stuck it down by the cushion.”
She looked at the earring on the table.
“I wasn’t going to wear them,” she said. “I want you to know that. I put them on because of your face.”
I didn’t say anything.
My phone went off on the coffee table, face up, between the envelope and the cake.
DAD. 9:14 PM.
Has she told you yet?
It went off again before I could pick it up.
Don’t let her talk first.
Eleven Marches
“Why does he care who talks first?” I said.
Ileana got up and went to the hall closet. She came back with a boot box and set it on the coffee table on top of the April envelope.
She took the lid off.
Envelopes. A stack of them, held with a rubber band gone soft. Every one of them the same blue ink, the same lean. Her name on the front. Nothing else.
No address. No stamp.
“He doesn’t mail them,” she said. “He puts them in my storm door. The Saturday of her weekend. Every year.”
I took the band off.
Each one had a date on the back flap in his hand. March 2016. March 2017. On down. The last one said March 2026.
Her weekend. The lake.
“I left Chillicothe that summer,” Ileana said. “I didn’t answer him once. I moved twice. When I opened the bakery it was in the paper, with my picture, and the next March there was one in my door.”
“You kept them.”
“I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do with them. Burn them? Then it’s like they never happened. And it happened.”
I opened the March 2026 one. One page off the same yellow pad.
Ileana. Drove past the bakery. You cut your hair. Eleven years and I’ve kept my end. I’m still waiting on yours. R.
Eleven years. He’d been driving past her bakery on the weekend my mother died, every year, and coming home Sunday night and washing his hands next to her reading glasses.
“Marjorie told me he was sitting down in the back,” I said. “That he couldn’t stand up.”
“He was standing fine,” Ileana said. “He was in the hallway with me. Your aunt walked in on us by the coat rack. She looked at him and she looked at me, and she picked the programs up off the table and went and found you.”
Thank you for coming. Two hundred times.
He was twenty feet away, with his hand on her knee and a pen.
Ileana put the lid back on the box. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the front door again.
“He said he’d come up on the day,” she said.
Out at the curb, a truck door shut.
The storm door
I opened the front door before he could knock. I left the storm door shut and locked.
Dad was in his barn coat with his truck keys still in his hand. He’d gotten a haircut. He looked at me, and then past me, at the room.
“Seth. Bud. Thank God.” He put his hand flat on the glass. “Get your keys. Whatever she’s told you, you come home with me tonight and I’ll tell you the real thing.”
I didn’t move.
“She’s not well, okay? She’s never been well. She came to your mother’s funeral, Seth. Who does that? She latched onto me when your mom was sick and I was at the bottom, and she’s never let it go, and now she’s gone and found you. You don’t see it because you’re a good kid.”
“Which lake, Dad,” I said.
He stopped.
“What?”
He looked at the boot box on the coffee table behind me. He knew that box. I could see him know it.
“Your mom and I had problems you don’t know about,” he said. “Long before that bed came in the house. I’m not proud of all of it. But I took care of her. I took care of you. I stood up when I had to.”
Behind me, Ileana stood up. She came as far as the end of the sectional and stopped.
Dad’s eyes went right to her ear. The one earring, still in.
His whole face changed.
“You put them on,” he said to her. Not to me. To her. “You put on something HE bought you.”
“Richard,” Ileana said.
“I told you one year. One year. I gave you eleven. I drove up there every March like a fool, and I kept my mouth shut, and I never once came to that door unless it was her weekend, out of respect.” He hit the glass with the side of his fist. Not hard. “And you go and pick my kid. Out of everybody. My kid.”
He wasn’t talking to me anymore. He hadn’t been for a while.
“Do you know what it was like,” he said to her, “watching him show me your picture at my own table?”
I went back to the coffee table. I picked up the boot box, and the April envelope, and the program.
I put the program in my back pocket.
Then I unlocked the storm door and pushed it open far enough to hand him the box.
He took it. He didn’t mean to. His hands just did it.
“Seth,” he said.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, and I shut the door.
The second Saturday in March
Jackson drove, because he said I’d drive like an idiot.
It was the weekend. Her weekend. Five months after Ileana’s birthday.
Dad’s called nineteen times since October. He left two voicemails. I listened to the first one, which was mostly him breathing, and I deleted the second without listening.
Aunt Marjorie sent me a Christmas card with a twenty-dollar bill in it and no note. Just her name.
Ileana texted me once, in November.
The earrings are back at the pawn shop, in your name. He said he’ll hold them as long as you want.
I haven’t gone in. I left both of them on her coffee table that night, next to the cake, and I walked out past my father’s truck with the program in my pocket.
It’s in the box in my closet now, with Mom’s cross. Or it was, until this morning.
I’m wearing the cross. The program’s on the dash.
We came in off 23 and Jackson slowed down at the cemetery gate and got his phone out.
“Hang on, I’ll pull it up,” he said. “What row is she?”
“Put it away,” I said. “I can find it.”
I got out of the truck and walked straight up the hill to her.
If this one got under your skin, send it to somebody who still keeps a funeral program in a drawer somewhere.
For more stories where grief brings buried family secrets to the surface, read “My Late Husband Wrote, ‘I’m The Reason Your Son Is In There'” and “His Teacher Held Up The Prison Picture I Give Up My Lunch To Afford”. And “Keith’s Mother Had The Funeral Check In Her Purse When The Boy Walked In” offers another moving funeral-day surprise.
