Thirty-one years, my mother kept two pages of her church cookbook stapled together.
Across the staples, in red marker, she had written: NOT UNTIL I’M IN THE GROUND.
I found it on a Tuesday, eleven days after they moved her into the palliative wing at St. Anselm’s.
The landlord wanted the house empty by the end of the month. There were no siblings to split the job with, no cousins close enough to drive in. So it was me, a box of contractor bags, and sixty-nine years of Gloria Pruett.
That morning, before I left her room, she had grabbed my wrist harder than anyone that sick should be able to.
“Nadine. The kitchen. Do the kitchen last.”
I blamed the morphine.
I was wrong.
The cookbook was wedged behind the bread box, swollen with newspaper clippings and old butter stains. It smelled like cinnamon and the Jergens lotion she rubbed into her knuckles every night.
The stapled pages sat between her chicken and dumplings and the lemon bars she’d baked for my wedding.
Eight staples. Evenly spaced. Nobody does that by accident.
I told myself I would wait.
I lasted about four minutes.
I worked them loose with a butter knife, one at a time. When the last one gave, the pages fell open, and something small and yellow slid onto the counter.
A hospital bracelet. The tiny kind they snap around a newborn’s ankle.
The type had faded, but I could still read it.
BABY GIRL VOSS.
Voss was my mother’s maiden name.
Behind the bracelet, pressed flat, was a Polaroid. My mother, barely more than a teenager, squinting into the sun on a porch I had never seen. Next to her stood a little girl in a striped swimsuit, maybe four years old.
The girl had a bare notch in her left eyebrow, a gap where the hair never grew.
My fingers went to my own face before I could stop them.
Same notch. Same spot. The one kids called my “scar” all through grade school.
On the white strip beneath the photo, in Mom’s tidy cursive: Loretta. Then a year.
Four years before I was born.
I slid down the cabinet until I was sitting on the linoleum.
Every Thanksgiving, when some relative asked why she never had more kids, my mother gave the same answer with the same little laugh.
“God gave me Nadine and figured one was plenty.”
I opened my phone and typed Loretta Voss. Nothing. I tried again with Bledsoe Creek, the Kentucky town Mom left at seventeen and never talked about.
Third page of results. A newspaper photo from a county 4-H auction. A woman in a denim jacket was pinning a blue ribbon on a boy holding a goat.
Gray at the temples. Softer around the jaw. Somewhere in her fifties.
The notch was still there.
I didn’t sleep that night.
At six the next morning, I found Mom’s old tablet in her nightstand, charger cord wrapped around it like a bandage. The passcode was my birthday. It always had been.
In the messages app, one conversation was pinned above everything else.
The contact was saved as a single letter. L.
I scrolled. Then I kept scrolling. Years of it. Happy birthdays. Tornado warnings. A blurry photo of a newborn with the caption “Your great-grandson, 7 lbs 2 oz.”
The newest message had arrived the night before, at 9:14 p.m., while Mom slept in a hospice bed and I sat in traffic with a bag of her laundry.
“Nadine’s at the house now. She’ll find the cookbook. Either you tell her or I will.”
Underneath it was an attachment.
My thumb hovered over it for a long time.
It was a certificate of live birth from Harlan County.
Mother: Gloria Ann Voss. Age: 16.
Father: (blank).
Child: Loretta June Voss.
MY MOTHER HAD ANOTHER DAUGHTER. AND SHE SPENT MY ENTIRE LIFE MAKING SURE I NEVER MET HER.
I pressed both hands flat on the counter because the kitchen had started to tilt.
The contact card for L had a phone number. Kentucky area code.
I dialed before I could talk myself out of it.
One ring. Two. On the third, I nearly hung up.
“Hello?”
Low voice. A little hoarse. And she flattened the “o” exactly the way my mother does.
“Is this Loretta?”
Nothing. Not a dropped call. I could hear a screen door creak somewhere behind her.
When she finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper.
“She swore to me. She swore you’d hear it from her mouth. Not from a baby bracelet in a cookbook.”
My whole body went cold.
“How do you know what I found?”
She didn’t answer.
Down the hall, my mother’s cell phone started buzzing on the dresser. The hospice nurse had sent it home with me because Mom’s hands couldn’t hold it anymore.
I told Loretta to wait. She said nothing.
I walked to the bedroom with the tablet still clutched against my chest.
No name on the screen. Just a number I’d never seen.
I picked up.
A man. Older. Breathing hard, like he’d been walking fast.
“Nadine? Don’t hang up. When you go back to see Gloria today, don’t let her explain anything. Not one word. Not until you’ve opened what Loretta mailed you.”
I looked back at my own phone.
The call with Loretta had ended.
And through the bedroom window, out at the curb, the red flag on my mother’s mailbox was standing straight up.
The Envelope Had Been Waiting in the Wrong Place
I didn’t go to the window.
I watched the flag through the glass until a delivery truck passed and blocked it. When the truck moved on, the flag was down.
There was no mail in the box.
I checked anyway. A grocery circular, two envelopes from the electric company, and a padded mailer with my name written in black pen.
No return address.
The handwriting leaned to the left.
I knew it before I opened it. My mother wrote grocery lists that way when her arthritis was bad.
The man on the phone was still there.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Calvin Reed.”
The name did nothing for me.
“You knew my mother?”
“I knew what happened to Loretta.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No. It isn’t.”
The mailer held a manila envelope, a brass key taped to a sheet of paper, and a letter folded twice.
The paper smelled like cigarette smoke.
I unfolded it.
Nadine,
If you’re reading this, then she either lost her nerve or ran out of time.
The blue house on Mill Creek Road belonged to your grandmother, Edith Voss. There’s a loose brick behind the back steps. The key is for the tin box under it.
Go alone. Don’t take Calvin. Don’t let Gloria’s lawyer get there first.
I am sorry I waited.
Loretta
I read it twice.
Then I called Calvin back.
He answered on the first ring.
“Why does Loretta think my mother’s lawyer is going to her grandmother’s house?”
“Because he knows about the box.”
“How?”
“Because I told him.”
That was not the answer I expected.
I put the letter on the bed. The room smelled like the lavender powder Mom used in her drawers, sweet and dusty. Her wedding picture sat on the dresser, the one with her holding a bouquet of white carnations and looking straight at the camera as if somebody had accused her of something.
“Calvin, start talking.”
He took a long time.
In 1985, he was a nineteen-year-old volunteer with the county ambulance service. He’d been sent to the Voss house on a Sunday morning in March. A neighbor had called because a teenage girl was bleeding in the yard.
“Loretta had fallen from the porch,” he said.
“She was four.”
“Yes.”
“She fell?”
“That’s what Gloria said.”
I gripped the edge of the dresser.
“Why would Loretta mail me a key thirty-one years later?”
“Because she found my name in her adoption file. She tracked me down in 2017.”
“What adoption file?”
“Her mother gave her away.”
The words landed badly. Not like a slap. More like a plate dropped in the sink, a sharp crack followed by pieces.
My mother had told everybody Loretta died.
I remembered that now.
Not the words. The shape of the story. A cousin at my baby shower had joked that Mom was lucky to have one child after “all she’d been through.” Mom had gone white and left the room. When I asked later, she said a baby had died before I was born. She’d never said a name.
“She told me Loretta was dead,” I said.
Calvin said nothing.
“Calvin.”
“She told the county that, too.”
Mill Creek Road
I drove to Mill Creek Road after noon.
The house was twenty minutes outside town, past the feed store and a church with a hand-painted sign that read PRAY FOR OUR FARMERS. The road narrowed to gravel near the creek. In May, the grass came up around the fence posts, and somebody had left a rusted child’s bicycle beside a mailbox.
The blue house was still there.
Not blue anymore, exactly. More like the color of an old bruise under peeling white paint. The porch sagged in the middle. A basketball hoop leaned over the driveway with no net.
I parked behind a stand of cedar trees.
Calvin had warned me not to bring anyone. I didn’t listen completely. I made my husband, Ray, stay in the car at the end of the drive with the engine running.
“Call me if you’re not back in ten minutes,” I told him.
“What happens at ten?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good plan.”
It wasn’t.
The loose brick was behind the back steps, half covered by dead leaves. I had to use my fingernails to lift it. Underneath sat a square metal box wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.
The brass key opened it.
Inside were three things: a black-and-white photograph, a folded court document, and a small cassette tape in a cracked plastic case.
The photograph showed two girls on the back porch.
Loretta was on the left, four years old, holding a tin cup. My mother stood beside her, sixteen and thin as a fence rail. There was a bruise under Gloria’s right eye.
On the back, somebody had written the date.
March 17, 1971.
I turned to the court document.
It was a temporary custody order. The names were typed crookedly.
Child: Loretta June Voss.
Temporary placement: Ruth and Harold Bell.
Reason: maternal home found unsafe following assault involving minor child.
The signature at the bottom belonged to Edith Voss.
My grandmother had given Loretta away.
Not my mother.
The cassette was labeled in blue ink: 3/17. CALVIN.
I took it to the car.
Ray looked at my face and started to open his door.
“Don’t,” I said.
The old cassette player in the console had never worked. I knew that. Still, I pressed the tape into the slot.
The machine clicked.
Static.
Then a girl’s voice.
Gloria.
“Tell them I fell.”
A man answered. Younger, shaky. Calvin.
“Your mother hit you.”
“I said tell them I fell.”
“Gloria, the baby needs a doctor.”
“She’ll go with the Bells. That’s what we agreed.”
A child cried in the background.
A hard sound followed. A door slamming, maybe.
Then Gloria said, “If they take me too, she’ll have nobody.”
The recording cut out.
Ray stared at me.
I kept my hand on the tape player.
“She was trying to protect her,” I said.
“From who?”
I looked at the photograph again. My grandmother’s house. My mother’s bruised eye. The child in the striped suit.
“I don’t know yet.”
The Story My Mother Chose
At St. Anselm’s, Mom was awake when I arrived.
Her nurse, Deirdre, was changing the water in a plastic cup. Deirdre had purple glasses and a habit of folding every tissue into a square before throwing it away.
“She asked for you twice,” she said.
“Did anyone else visit?”
Deirdre looked at me over her glasses.
“A woman came yesterday.”
“Who?”
“She said she was family.”
My hand stopped on the doorknob.
“What did she look like?”
“Short hair. Denim jacket. She brought a paper bag with oranges.”
Loretta.
“Did you let her in?”
“Your mother told me to.”
Inside, Mom lay on her side with her face turned toward the window. Her hair had been brushed, but one silver strand stuck out near her ear.
She saw the envelope in my hand.
Her eyes closed.
“Is she outside?” she asked.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
I put the manila envelope on the chair.
“Your daughter.”
Mom’s mouth trembled once. Her hand moved across the blanket, searching for the rail.
I didn’t touch it.
“Her name is Loretta.”
“Yes.”
“You gave her away.”
“Yes.”
“She was alive.”
Mom stared at the ceiling.
“Yes.”
The plainness of it made me angry. I wanted a broken confession. I wanted her to fight me, to say there had been a mistake, to blame a nurse or a priest or some rotten county clerk.
Instead she said, “I kept you.”
“Why?”
“I thought if I had you, she would stay safe.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It didn’t then, either.”
She turned her head toward me.
“Your grandmother had a man living in the house. He wasn’t your grandfather. He was her brother, Dale. He liked little girls. He had already hurt Loretta.”
My fingers curled around the envelope.
“Did he hurt you?”
Mom looked at the wall.
“He tried.”
The room’s radiator clicked on. Somewhere at the end of the hall, a television laughed at a joke nobody in this room heard.
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“We did. My mother told them Loretta fell. Then she sent her away. Dale left two days later.”
“Where?”
“Ohio. Then Indiana. He died in a factory fire.”
Mom swallowed.
“I was sixteen. I had no money. No car. Ruth Bell took Loretta because she couldn’t have children. They promised they would let me write. They didn’t.”
“But you found her.”
“She found me.”
The sentence sat between us.
Mom told me they began writing in 1999. Loretta sent the first letter to the church, addressed to Gloria Voss. The pastor recognized the name and brought it to her after Sunday service.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were pregnant with Abby.”
My little girl had died at two days old.
That was the part I hadn’t known was connected.
Mom had held me in the hospital while I shook over the empty bassinet. She had brought casseroles, washed my hair when I couldn’t stand in the shower, and slept in a chair beside my bed.
All those years, I believed she had been grieving with me.
“I didn’t want to put another dead child in your hands,” she said.
“Loretta wasn’t dead.”
“I know that now.”
“No. You knew that for thirty-one years.”
Mom’s eyes filled, but she didn’t cry. She had always been bad at crying. Her face tightened around it until nothing moved.
“She wanted to meet you,” Mom said.
“Did you stop her?”
“At first.”
“Why?”
“Because I was ashamed.”
That answer was so small I almost laughed.
Mom went on. Loretta had asked to meet me in 2004, after my wedding. Gloria refused. She said I was happy, and Loretta’s life was complicated, and there was no good reason to drag old things into it.
“She had children,” Mom said. “She had a husband. She was happy too. I kept choosing the day in front of me.”
On the chair, the letter from Loretta made a soft paper sound when the air vent moved.
“She said you swore I’d hear it from your mouth.”
“I did.”
“When?”
Mom’s eyes went to the clock.
“After you clean the kitchen.”
I stepped away from the bed.
“You knew I was going to find it.”
“I put it there.”
That stopped me.
“The cookbook?”
“Your father gave it to me when he was dying. I hid the pages after he left.”
“My father knew?”
“He knew about Loretta. Not everything.”
“How did you know I’d look?”
“You always clean the kitchen last.”
I wanted to say that was ridiculous. That I had done it because the kitchen had too many cabinets and because old grease made me sick.
Instead I said, “The man on the phone told me not to let you explain.”
“Calvin.”
“You know him.”
“He was the ambulance boy.”
“Why did Loretta send me to the house?”
Mom’s face changed.
Not fear. Recognition.
“The box.”
“What about it?”
“Did you listen to the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know enough.”
“No, I don’t.”
She shut her eyes.
“I signed the first paper giving her to the Bells. But your grandmother wrote the second one. The one that made it legal.”
Mom’s hand began to shake. She pressed it against the blanket.
“I stole the court copy.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted one thing that proved she was mine.”
“And you hid it for thirty-one years.”
“I hid it because Dale came back.”
The Name on the Back
I called Calvin from the hospital parking lot.
He answered without saying hello.
“Who is Dale Voss?”
The line went quiet.
“How does Gloria know he came back?”
“Because he called me in 1990.”
I leaned against the hood of my car.
“What did he want?”
“Money. He said he knew where Loretta lived.”
“Did he?”
“No. I thought he was lying.”
“You thought?”
Calvin breathed out through his nose.
“I paid him.”
“How much?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“With what money?”
“Money from Gloria.”
There it was. The second thing my mother had kept.
Calvin told me Dale had mailed him a photograph of Loretta’s house in Indiana. On the back was a threat: Tell Gloria I remember the porch.
Calvin had gone to Gloria because he thought she was in danger. She gave him the money and made him promise not to contact Loretta.
“Why did you stay quiet?”
“Because Gloria asked me to. Because I was young. Pick one.”
I drove home after dark.
A package waited on the porch, damp at one corner. Ray had brought it inside, but not opened it.
The return address was Loretta’s.
Inside was a second letter and a photograph of a man I had never seen. He was standing beside a grain elevator, one hand on a cane. His face was narrow. His hair was white.
On the back: Dale, 1988.
The letter was shorter than the first.
Nadine,
The man on the phone is Calvin Reed. He has told you some of it.
He has not told you that Dale was not the reason I was taken.
Your mother was.
She struck me with a cast-iron pan when I tried to stop her from leaving. She thought she was saving me. She was sixteen and scared and wrong.
I have spent thirty-one years listening to her say I was stolen. I was not. She put me in the Bell car herself.
I know what happened to her. I do not know what happened to me.
If you want the rest, come Saturday at 2:00 to the St. Anselm’s chapel. Come alone.
I read the letter standing beside the kitchen sink.
Ray was at the table, his hands around a mug he wasn’t drinking from.
“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“She says come alone.”
“She means you.”
“That isn’t how words work.”
He looked at the photograph.
“Who is that?”
“My uncle, I think.”
I turned the photo over again.
There was another mark under Dale’s name, written in faded pencil.
Ask Gloria about the red dress.
Saturday at Two
Mom died Friday at 4:18 in the morning.
Deirdre called me at 4:26. I drove through two red lights and arrived with my coat unbuttoned, one shoe untied.
The room looked almost the same. The plastic cup. The folded tissues. The wedding picture.
Her hand was under the blanket.
I sat beside her until the nurse came in.
At 1:52 Saturday afternoon, I went to the chapel.
Loretta sat in the last pew wearing the same denim jacket from the newspaper photograph. Up close, she looked less like my mother than I expected. Same eyebrow notch. Same mouth. Different eyes.
She rose when I entered.
For a second, neither of us moved.
Then she said, “You have her hands.”
I looked down.
They were shaking.
“She said you were four when she gave you away.”
“I was.”
“She said she saved you.”
Loretta’s mouth pulled to one side.
“She saved herself from watching me grow up.”
The chapel smelled of floor wax and old hymnals. A tiny plastic cup had rolled beneath the front pew. I noticed it and didn’t pick it up.
Loretta told me the rest.
The red dress belonged to our mother. Gloria had worn it the night she packed Loretta’s clothes in a pillowcase. She had promised they were going for a drive, just the two of them.
At the Bell house, Gloria had helped Loretta out of the car.
Then she had stepped back.
“Your grandmother told her Loretta would be safer there,” Loretta said. “Your mother believed her. She was a child too.”
“Why say she was stolen?”
“Because it made a cleaner story.”
“And the pan?”
Loretta touched the notch in her eyebrow.
“She missed me. I got between her and the front door. She swung. It caught me here.”
I looked at the matching place on my own face.
“That’s how I got mine?”
“Probably. Your mother said you fell into a coffee table when you were three.”
I sat down.
Loretta placed a small envelope on the pew between us.
“This is yours.”
Inside was a letter from Mom, dated three weeks before she entered hospice.
I read it slowly.
Nadine,
I gave Loretta away because I believed love meant putting the child somewhere I couldn’t reach. Then I spent the rest of my life calling that sacrifice so I wouldn’t have to call it what it was.
I lied about the dead baby because I couldn’t bear to say her name while you were carrying Abby. That was wrong too.
The red flag on the mailbox is for Loretta. If she comes after I die, I wanted you to know she was here.
I couldn’t tell you while I was alive.
I wanted to.
That was all.
No grand explanation. No request for forgiveness. No instructions about the house.
Just the lie, sitting on two pages of paper.
Loretta watched me finish.
“She put the flag up the night before I visited,” she said.
“What?”
“She had me drive past the house. She couldn’t come outside. She told me to raise it if I was ready for you to know.”
“She couldn’t come outside?”
“She was already using oxygen.”
I looked through the chapel window toward the parking lot. A red mailbox stood near the road, its flag lowered now.
“Why did you call me and then hang up?”
“I panicked.”
“You sounded like her.”
“I know.”
That was the first thing that made me laugh. It came out wrong, a little cough with a laugh caught inside it.
Loretta smiled.
Then the chapel door opened behind us.
Calvin stood there, holding his hat in both hands.
Loretta turned. Her face hardened.
“I told you not to come.”
“I know.”
He held out a small envelope.
“I found this in my truck.”
Nobody took it.
He set it on the end of the pew and left.
The envelope had my mother’s handwriting on it. The date was from the week before she died.
Inside was a single sentence.
Dale did come back, but he never touched Loretta again. The man who hurt her was me.
Loretta read it over my shoulder.
Below the sentence, in smaller writing, Mom had added:
I told her she was safe. Then I made her leave.
Loretta folded the paper.
Neither of us spoke.
Outside, a car passed on the wet road. Its tires hissed, then were gone.
She took my hand.
Her palm was rough. Mine had the same little half-moon scar near the thumb, the one I got opening a can of peaches when I was twelve.
“Do you want to see the house?” she asked.
I looked at her.
“Which one?”
“The blue one.”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
We left the chapel together.
At the curb, the red flag on the mailbox lifted in the wind and dropped again.
This time, nobody had touched it.
Would you have opened the envelope? Tell me.
For more stories that blur the lines between the living and the departed, check out “I Opened My Hymnal Before the Pastor Could Ask for Another Dollar” and “My Mother-in-Law Sent My Husband a Message From Three Years Ago,” or perhaps “The Man at the Post Office Box Had My Husband’s Limp.”
