I still have the receipt from Mercy General Hospital folded into the back of my old hymn book, stamped in red ink with the sum of $2,900 that my daddy had to borrow against his truck to keep the collection agency off our backs. I was seventeen years old, and my stomach was flat again, but the room still smelled like the cold iron table and the harsh floor wax they used in the maternity ward.
My mother sat on the plastic chair by the door with her coat buttoned all the way to her chin, even though the room was stifling, and she never once looked at the bassinet down the hall where they took the baby before I could even touch her skin.
She just looked at her wristwatch and said we had chores waiting back home in Vernon County and the sooner we got on the gravel road, the better.
I signed my name at the bottom of those papers with a ballpoint pen that skipped on the third letter of my last name. The social worker had short hair parted on the side and smelled faintly of peppermint gum, and she told me it was a closed adoption and I would never have to worry about looking over my shoulder.
My daddy didn’t talk the whole thirty-two miles home in the cab of the Ford pickup, and neither did I, because my throat felt like it was lined with dry dust. That night I climbed up the stairs to the little room under the eaves where the rain used to drum against the tin roof, and I found a single Polaroid tucked inside the pages of my confirmation Bible.
It wasn’t much of a picture, just the top of a pink flannel blanket and one tiny ear that looked like a peeled almond, but a nurse with ink-stained fingers must have slipped it in there when nobody else was looking. For thirty-eight years, I kept that Bible on the nightstand beside my iron bed, and every Sunday morning before I walked down to the First Methodist fellowship hall, I opened to the gospel of Luke and touched my thumb to the edge of that photo.
I married a quiet man named Arlo ten years later, a man who worked the grain elevator and never asked questions about the small silver locket I wore under my cotton shirts, the one that held nothing inside it except a fold of yellowed paper. We never had any more children, not because we didn’t want them, but because something inside me had stayed back in that hospital room on a Tuesday morning in November when the ground was covered in frozen slush.
Arlo passed away during the winter of the big ice storm, and after that, the house got very quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear the mice chewing in the pantry walls and the old water heater groaning in the basement. I spent my days volunteering down at the church basement, folding bulletins and sorting through boxes of old hymnals that people donated when their grandmothers passed away or went into the home down in Lancaster.
Last spring, on a Wednesday when the rain was coming down sideways against the lancet windows, I was sitting at the long oak folding table in the back room cleaning out the bindings of some old green books with a damp rag. A loose sheet fluttered out from the middle of a book with gold lettering on the spine, and it landed face down on my worn canvas apron.
I picked it up by the corner, and my hands started shaking before I even turned it over, because I knew the weight of that heavy Polaroid paper anywhere in the world. It was the same picture of the pink blanket and the little almond ear, but when I flipped it over, there was blue ink written in a hurried, looping hand across the white margin.
She has your left dimple.
I sat there at that long oak table for a long time while the grandfather clock in the corner ticked off the minutes, and nobody came into the room because the Tuesday Bible study had been canceled on account of the weather. My chest felt tight, like someone had cinched a leather belt around my ribs three holes too tight, and I couldn’t get a proper breath of air into the bottom of my lungs.
I didn’t tell anybody, not even Pastor Miller when he came in to check on the coffee pot at four o’clock, because I didn’t have the words to explain how a piece of paper I had lost thirty-eight years ago had found its way back into the middle of a book nobody had opened since the Carter administration.
Three days later, I was standing at my kitchen sink peeling potatoes for a pot of soup when the front screen door gave that familiar little squeak that meant the latch wasn’t quite catching the frame. I looked out through the sheer lace curtain, and there was a woman standing on the second porch step holding a little bunch of grocery store carnations wrapped in green cellophane that had a price tag of $16 stamped on the outside.
She looked about forty, with dark hair pulled back in a practical clip and a coat the color of wet cedar, and when she turned her head to look at the house number by the doorbell, I saw it plain as day.
It was my daddy’s dimple, the one that showed up in the left corner of his mouth whenever he laughed at a bad joke or looked at a new calf in the spring pasture.
I dried my hands on the dish towel tucked into my apron band and walked out to the porch, and the screen door felt heavy under my palm as I pushed it open to let the cold April wind blow right between us.
She didn’t look like she was mad, but her lower lip was trembling just a little bit, the way mine used to do whenever my mother told me I was making a fuss over nothing at all.
“I found the book,” she said, and her voice was lower than mine, but it had that same little catch in the middle of a sentence that Arlo used to tease me about. “At the rummage sale down in Platteville. My little girl wanted the hymnal for the old dried-up four-leaf clover someone left inside it.”
I couldn’t say anything, so I just stood there with the dish towel balled up in my fist, looking at the little green cellophane wrap on the carnations.
She took a step closer, right up to the top of the porch where the gray paint was peeling off in strips from the winter freeze, and she looked me straight in the eyes without dropping her chin.
“I don’t want your money,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake at all when she said it. “I want to know why you…”
She stopped right there, her left dimple deepening as she looked down at my apron strings, and she didn’t finish the sentence because she didn’t have to.
