Sincerely,
Delphine Ott
There was a phone number at the bottom, and an address in the Highlands in Louisville, and that was all.
I read it twice. Then I set it down on the quilt, on the block in the center of the third row, and I went upstairs, and I lay down on my bed on the bare mattress pad, and I cried the way I hadn't cried since I was nine. Not for Grandma Ivy, exactly, or not only. For a girl of fifteen in a sewing room in Clay County saying thirty names over in the dark. For a woman in Frankfort with a letter coming apart in her purse. For my mother in a grocery store with a bag of clementines, who never knew she had a sister in the world. And, if I'm honest, a little for Carla, in the back seat of a Pontiac in a sleeping bag with a flashlight, which I did not want to cry about and did anyway.
* * *
Our house on Mulberry Street is old, and it has the old kind of heat, a big gas furnace in the basement and iron floor registers in every room, and the register in my bedroom floor is right over the kitchen. When I was little, Mom used to say she could hear me whispering to my stuffed animals through it. Around eleven, I heard Dad and Carla through it.
I didn't go to it on purpose. I want to say that. But I didn't move away either.
"Eight months," Carla was saying. Not loud. She never got loud. "Eight months, Wade. You knew there was a woman in Frankfort waiting for an answer, and you knew what was on that child's bed, and you watched me pack this house around it. You watched me pack it."
"I know."
"You let me live in a museum and you never once told me what was in the cases."
"I know, Carla."
"Then why?"
It was quiet for so long I thought he wasn't going to answer. I heard the refrigerator kick on. I heard a chair scrape.
"Because every time I opened my mouth about Ivy, or Laurel, or any of it," Dad said finally, "you'd go out to the garage with your tape gun. And I'd let you. Because it was easier. Because if I didn't talk about them, I didn't have to feel like I was choosing. Like every time I said Laurel's name in this kitchen I was taking something away from you." His voice was rough. "I didn't know how to let you in without letting her go. So I didn't