Page 82 of Rooster's Remorse
Years of a man who took everything from my mother, mailing her a Hallmark card every December like an old friend who moved away and got sentimental about it.
I look down at the top of my mother's head.
There's more gray in the part than there was ten years ago and I wasn't there for any of it.
She's been sitting alone in a house in Sierra Vista every December opening her mailbox and finding him in it, and she never told me.
Years of Sunday phone calls and she never once said,he sent another one.
Because she knew what I'd do.
Because protecting me was the only thing she had left to do for me, and she did it the same way I did it for Mila, by keeping her mouth shut and keeping it to herself.
We're a family of people who go quiet to keep each other safe. And look what it built.
"There's nothing in them," I say. "He never says anything. It's?—"
"It's the reminder," Imani says, low. "Every year. That he knows where she lives. That he can reach her mailbox whenever he feels like it. He doesn't have to threaten her. The card is the threat. The card saysI know exactly where you are, and this year I'm choosing to only send a card." She lays another one down. "He's showing her the leash without pulling it. Ten years running."
My mother's gone gray in the face, and I tighten my grip on her shoulder. She reaches up without looking and puts her hand over mine and holds on hard.
Then Imani reaches the last one.
Last Christmas. And she stops before she opens it, because she's looking at the envelope. "Marie. Did you ever look at these? Even the front of them?"
"No." My mother's barely breathing. "Never the front. I couldn't."
Imani turns the envelope around so I can see.
Ten years of envelopes that readMarie Kincaid.
This one readsMarie & Camila.
The bottom drops out of the whole room.
"That's—" My mother's hand flies to her mouth. "That's not—how does he even?—"
"He knows." Imani's voice has gone flat and slow and deliberate. "By last Christmas he knew Camila was alive, and he knew she'd found her way back to you. That's months ago, Marie. He's known for months."
"Open it," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine.
Imani opens it.
A cabin in the snow, warm light in the windows. Inside, the same steady hand:
A blessing to have family found again. — Wen.
And a photograph is tucked inside it.
Imani slides it out, looks at it, goes still, then turns it over and sets it on the table facing me, and the cold I've felt all day walks straight up my spine and settles at the base of my skull.
It's us.
Me and Mila, seven years old, on the Bacani front porch in high summer, sunburned and gap-toothed, and there's a brown dog wedged between us with a stick in his mouth and his whole body mid-wag.
Cricket.
It's me, Mila, and Cricket on her mother's porch the better part of thirty years ago.
