My mother tried to throw my dead father’s last package in the garbage before I could even read the label. “He had no one up there,” she said, “so it’s no one’s business.” It was postmarked Kodiak, the town Dad left at nineteen and never set foot in again, and what I found inside put her on the kitchen floor.
Dad and I had the kind of thing where I told him everything.
Boys. Money. The dent I put in his truck at sixteen and lied about for a week.
He told me almost nothing back.
Some nights I’d come downstairs for water and find him at the table with the radio off, rolling a smooth gray stone between his fingers like he was trying to wear it flat.
“Where’d that come from?” I said once.
“Off a beach where the water’s so cold it hurts your teeth,” he said. “You hear the gulls a good hour before you ever see a boat.”
That was as close as he came.
He’d been born up there. He came down at nineteen, worked a grain elevator, met Mom at a church fish fry, and after that the name of his town didn’t get said at our table.
If he slipped, Mom got up and ran the dishwater.
Loud.
Like the water could cover it.
For years I figured she was jealous of a place on a map.
“Go easy on your mother, Nat,” he said when I was fourteen and furious about it. “She’s carried more for this family than you’ll ever know about.”
I never asked him what that meant.
Now I’ll be asking for the rest of my life.
Eleven days ago Dad went out to rake the side yard and didn’t come back in.
The neighbor found him in the leaves with the rake still in his hand.
Sixty-seven.
His heart, the doctor said, like that explained anything.
I drove in from three states away and didn’t leave. Mom wasn’t eating. Somebody had to answer the door for the casseroles.
The morning after the funeral, the mail carrier knocked instead of using the box.
She had a cardigan covered in orange cat hair and a carton the size of a microwave balanced on her hip.
“Needs a signature,” she said. “For Franklin Voss.”
I signed his name. My hand did it before the rest of me caught up.
The label was in blue marker, all block capitals, a little shaky. The postmark was four days before he died.
No sender. Just the town.
I set it on the kitchen table and dug in the drawer for scissors. Whoever mailed this didn’t know yet. Somebody had to call them.
Mom came in from the hallway wearing Dad’s robe.
She looked at the carton.
Then she read the postmark.
The color went out of her face all at once, like somebody had pulled a plug in her.
“Put that in the truck,” she said.
“Mom, this is for Dad.”
“I can read.” She grabbed my wrist hard enough to hurt. “I’ll run it to the dump today. We are not opening that.”
“Somebody up there doesn’t know he’s gone.”
“They know plenty,” she said.
I yanked my arm back.
Thirty-four years old and I had never once pulled away from my mother.
But I was NOT letting her bury the last thing anybody ever sent him.
I ran the scissors down the tape.
On top was a man’s canvas work coat, folded square. It smelled like diesel and salt and something sweet, like an old pipe.
Under it, a photograph in a plastic sleeve.
Dad. Nineteen, maybe younger. Squinting on a dock with his arm around a dark-haired girl in a yellow rain slicker.
She had a little boy on her hip.
I flipped it over.
Dad’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. It was on every birthday card I ever got.
Todd, 8 months. Back for him by Christmas.
Under that, in the same pencil: 1977.
“Mom,” I said. “Who is TODD?”
She didn’t answer. She had both hands on the edge of the counter like the floor was tilting.
Under the photo was a business envelope, already opened and tucked back in. It was addressed to Dad at a post office box here in town.
A post office box.
Dad didn’t even like checking our own mailbox.
Inside was a printed boarding pass for November 9th. His name. ONE WAY.
And a note on lined paper.
Dad, I know you said you’d tell them first this time, but I went ahead and bought it. Mom doesn’t have long. She keeps asking whether you’re really coming or whether Cecile’s paper still stands.
I read it twice.
Cecile is my mother.
“What paper?” I said.
Her mouth opened and shut.
“WHAT PAPER, MOM?”
“He promised me,” she said. “He PROMISED me he’d never write back to them.”
“How long has he been writing back?”
She slid down the cabinet until she was sitting on the linoleum in his robe with both hands over her face.
“Natalia,” she said through her fingers. “Put every bit of it back in that box before your brother calls this house again.”
Seven-fifteen
“My what?” I said.
She kept her hands where they were.
“Your brother. Todd. He’s forty-nine.” She said it to the floor. “He calls at seven-fifteen every night. Every night since the fourteenth.”
The fourteenth was the day after Dad died.
“And you talk to him?”
“I let it ring.”
The phone was on the wall by the fridge. Same tan one we’d always had, with the cord Dad used to stretch out the back door so he could hear the ball game on the step. The answering machine under it showed a red zero.
She’d been deleting them.
Eleven nights. A man up there calling his father’s house, and nobody picking up, and nobody telling him.
I took the boarding pass out of the envelope, folded it once and put it in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Give me that,” Mom said.
“No.”
She got one hand back on the counter and pulled herself partway up, and stopped there, bent over, in his robe.
“You don’t know what it costs if you pick up that phone,” she said. “He sounds exactly like your father.”
The truck keys
The dent happened the summer I was sixteen.
Dad’s truck was a brown Ford with a bench seat and a hook by the back door where his keys lived. He had about a dozen on that ring. House, shed, the church basement, the elevator gate, the locker at the elevator, and some I never could place.
I took it to the lake when I’d been told not to, and I backed it into a light pole outside the bait shop. A dent in the tailgate the shape of a dinner plate.
I hung the keys back on the hook and said nothing for a week.
When he finally asked, he didn’t yell. He sat at the kitchen table and turned the ring over in his hand and said one thing.
“You go through my keys, Nat?”
That was all he wanted to know. Not the lake. Not the pole.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
He held up a small brass one with 1144 stamped in it. “Locker at work,” he said, before I’d asked.
He never fixed the dent. He said it gave the truck character. It was still there yesterday when I parked it behind the hearse.
The other thing I know about that house is the gray box.
When I was twelve, Mom walked me into her closet and showed me a fireproof safe on the floor behind her winter boots. She made me learn the combination. 0-7-2-2. My birthday.
“The deed, the insurance, and things that are nobody’s business,” she said. “If something happens to us, you open it. Not before.”
Mom was a Houck before she was a Voss. Her daddy ran the office at the elevator, and he’s the one who hired Dad the week he came down, nineteen years old, with a duffel bag and nothing else. Mom did the books there at night for most of my life. I thought that was how people paid for houses.
At the funeral lunch yesterday, with a paper plate of ham on her knee, she asked me the one thing she always asks.
“When are you putting that money into a house?”
Thirty-four thousand dollars. Eight years of saving. She knows the number because I told her the number.
“Spring,” I said, like I always do.
Now I stood in her kitchen with my brother’s plane ticket in my pocket and looked at the hook by the back door.
Dad’s keys were still on it. So was the brass one.
Box 1144
I took the truck downtown. I didn’t ask.
The post office is a brick building across from the bank, one flight of steps and a wall of little bronze doors with windows in them. I walked along the wall until I found it, low down by the floor.
1144.
The key went in like it had done it a thousand times.
There was a stack in there, held with two rubber bands gone soft and gray. Envelopes, all sizes, all with the Kodiak postmark. Some in a woman’s round hand. Most in block capitals, the same as the label on the carton.
I sat on the floor of the lobby and went through them. I couldn’t wait until I got home.
A school photo of a boy about ten with Dad’s ears.
A boy in a cap and gown.
A man in a suit on a church step with a bride.
A man holding a baby girl up next to a boat with the name painted over.
On the back of that one, in the block capitals: Your granddaughter. She has the Voss chin, sorry.
I had a niece. I had a niece who was probably in high school by now.
“You’re his girl.”
The woman behind the counter had come around it. She was in her sixties with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and her name tag said KENYA.
“I’m so sorry about your dad,” she said. “I saw it in the paper. He’s had that box since before I started here, and I started in ’89. Came in every Monday on his lunch.”
“Did he ever mail anything back?”
“Every week. Always a regular envelope.” She looked at the stack in my lap. “Three weeks ago he mailed a thick one. I asked was it a birthday. He said, ‘Sending a ticket back. Not this year either.'”
My throat closed up. I held the photo of the baby.
“Then the Friday before he passed, he came in and asked could he use our phone. Long distance. I let him. I’m not supposed to.”
“Who did he call?”
“I didn’t listen.” She did. Everybody listens. “He hung up and stood there a minute and said, ‘Well. It’s already on its way to the house. I’d better tell her.'”
“Tell her what?”
“He didn’t say.” She took her glasses off and let them hang. “He was smiling, though. He asked me to hold his mail starting November 8th. He said he’d be gone a week.”
The phone cord
Carey Bickford’s car was in the driveway when I got back.
Carey has been Mom’s friend from church since before I was born. She brought a ham loaf to the funeral and a ham loaf today, and she was standing at our sink washing the dish from the first one.
The carton was gone off the table. It was by the back door, taped shut again with silver duct tape, wrapped around and around.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Lying down. And you’re going to leave her be.” Carey dried her hands. “We’ll run that out to the transfer station in the morning, me and her. Then it’s done.”
“There’s a man up there who doesn’t know his father’s dead.”
Carey folded the dish towel in thirds and hung it on the oven handle.
“Honey, everybody at church knew Frank had a girl up north before he married. Your grandpa Houck saw to it. We just didn’t say it. That’s what you do for people.”
“Saw to what?”
“Leave it alone, Natalia. She’s been through enough.”
Mom came in at ten past seven. She’d gotten dressed. Slacks and a sweater, her hair combed, like company was coming.
She looked at the clock on the stove.
Carey looked at the clock on the stove.
At seven-fifteen the phone rang.
I got there first. I had my hand on the receiver.
Mom didn’t go for my hand. She went for the wall. She got her fingers on the cord where it plugged into the jack and pulled it straight out, little plastic clip and all, and the ringing stopped in the middle of a ring.
The kitchen was quiet except for the fridge.
“Carey, go home,” Mom said.
Carey went. She took her clean dish.
Mom wound the cord around her hand and held it there.
“If you call that number,” she said, “you can go back to wherever it is you live, and you can stay there.”
0-7-2-2
She took one of the pills the doctor gave her and went to bed at nine.
I sat at the table until one in the morning with the carton, the stack from the post office and the boarding pass. Then I went down the hall in my socks.
The safe was where it always was, behind the winter boots.
0-7-2-2.
The deed was on top. The insurance under it, in a blue folder. Under that, a manila envelope with one letter on the front in Mom’s handwriting.
F.
Inside was a single sheet on letterhead. HOUCK GRAIN & FEED, and the old phone number with only five digits. It was typed on a machine that dropped its e’s a little below the line. March 1978.
I, Cecile Houck, will send one hundred fifty dollars by money order on the first of every month to Lourdes, the boy’s mother, of Kodiak, Alaska, for the keep of the boy Todd until he is eighteen years old. In return Franklin Voss stays where he is. No visits. No letters either way. If Franklin goes back to Kodiak, or if anybody from that family writes to this one, every dollar sent comes back to me.
Three signatures at the bottom.
Mom’s, round and young. She was eighteen.
A woman’s, small, pressed in hard enough to dent the paper.
Dad’s.
Clipped behind it was a green spiral notebook, the kind you buy at the drugstore. It was Mom’s handwriting in green ink, one line a month. The date, the money order number, $150.00.
I counted the pages. Eighteen years. The last line was May 1995.
At the bottom of the last page someone had added it up, the way Mom adds up everything.
$32,400.00
Under the total there was one more line. Same green pen. The ink was so new it still shone a little.
Oct. 12. F. told me. Bill her.
November 9th
I plugged the cord back in at seven in the morning.
I had Todd’s number off the top of his last letter. I sat at the table with the paper and the green notebook in front of me, the stack from the post office and the carton with the duct tape on it, and I dialed.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
Mom was right. It was Dad’s voice, maybe a little higher.
“This is Natalia,” I said. “Franklin’s daughter.”
Nothing on the line.
“He died, Todd. The thirteenth. He was out raking.”
I could hear a radio somewhere behind him, and then I couldn’t, like he’d covered the phone. When he came back his voice was all air.
“He called me. The Friday before. He said he’d changed his mind. I told him I’d already sent his coat and his ticket to the house, and he laughed. He said, ‘Then I’d better tell Cecile Saturday.'”
Mom was in the doorway.
She’d heard the dial tone go. She saw the paper on the table and the notebook open to the last page, and she didn’t even try to take them.
She just started talking.
“Yes, he told me. Saturday night, at this table, eating soup. Wanted me to know before his box came. Fifty years and he wanted to be polite about it.” She came in and stood across from me. “So I told him fine. Go. Get on the plane. And when you land I mail that woman the bill for every dime I ever sent her, her and her boy, and she can die owing me.”
“Mom.”
“Do you know what he did? He said, ‘Okay, Cece.’ And he went to bed.” Her mouth went flat. “And in the morning he went out to rake.”
Todd said something in my ear. I didn’t catch it.
“I was eighteen years old,” Mom said. “I did the books at that elevator every night for eighteen years so that boy had shoes and your father had a reason to sit at my table. And he sat. Every night of my life, with that rock in his hand. Don’t you look at me like I did something. I PAID.”
“Natalia,” Todd said. His voice had gone careful. “My mom got a letter from your mom on Saturday. Typed. With a total at the bottom.”
I looked at her.
“They broke it,” Mom said. “That box came to MY house. Addressed to MY husband. They broke it, not me.”
She’d mailed it the week we buried him. While the phone rang every night at seven-fifteen and she let it.
I got up and went to my purse on the hook by the door and came back with my checkbook. I wrote it out at the table. Pay to the order of Cecile Voss. Thirty-two thousand four hundred and no cents. In the memo line I wrote Lourdes, Kodiak, paid in full.
I tore it off and laid it on the green notebook, on top of her total.
Mom looked down at it.
“That’s your house,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want your money. I never wanted anybody’s money. I wanted him to stay home.”
“He did,” I said.
Then I picked the phone back up.
“Todd. What time does that flight leave on the ninth?”
Kodiak
Mom cashed it on the third. I saw it come out of my account on my phone in the airport in Seattle.
She didn’t drive me to the airport. She stood at the back door in his robe and didn’t come down the steps. That was all.
I carried the carton on my lap from Anchorage. I’d cut the duct tape off and repacked it and taped it again with clear tape, and I’d written on the label myself, block capitals, blue marker.
LOURDES. KODIAK. CARE OF TODD.
Dad was right. You hear the gulls before you see anything.
Todd met me at the bottom of the little plane’s stairs. He was taller than Dad, and he had Dad’s ears and Dad’s way of standing with his hands in his back pockets. He took the box off me without asking, the way Dad would have.
The hospital is up on a hill above the harbor. She was in a room at the end, small in the bed, with her hair gone white and cut short. On the windowsill there was a stack of birthday cards, forty-nine of them, held with a rubber band.
Todd set the carton on the chair. I opened it.
She looked at the coat a long time.
“She keeps asking if he’s coming,” Todd said.
I took the stone out of my jacket pocket, the smooth gray one, and put it in her hand.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose family keeps a drawer nobody’s allowed to open.
Family secrets have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment – see what happens in “My Mother Kept My Father’s Bills In A Kitchen Drawer For Twenty-Seven Years” and “Dad Sent My Daughter Down To The Dock Before He Would Say Why”.
