Thirty-eight years ago, my husband drove our five-year-old daughter to his mother’s house and never brought her back. I never moved, and I never changed my phone number, in case she called.
Her name was Becky. She had a dimple in her left cheek and a cowlick I could never flatten. Every morning she sat on the kitchen stool and told me, “Braid it tight, Mama.”
In June of 1988, my husband, Pierce, said he would take her to his mother Velma’s house in Indiana for a week. Our marriage was already falling apart. I thought time apart might help.
“It’s only a week,” Pierce said.
“I know,” I told him. “Just bring her back when you say you will.”
I tied a yellow ribbon at the end of Becky’s braid and kissed her through the car window. I can still picture the ribbon. I did not know I was saying goodbye.
When they didn’t come back, I called Velma.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“I don’t know where he went, Esther. I swear on my Bible.”
“Did he leave Becky with you?”
“I can’t help you if I don’t know where he is.”
I asked her again. She gave me the same answer. I couldn’t make her tell me anything else, and I had no idea where to look.
The sheriff came to the house and wrote down what I told him. He said, “He’s her daddy, ma’am. Till a judge says otherwise, it’s a family matter.”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“You can go to court.”
So I did. By the next spring, I had custody papers. They didn’t bring Becky home. There was no man to hand them to. Pierce had changed his name, and hers. My brother-in-law said Pierce had gone out West, but that was all anybody would say.
I was twenty-nine. I hired a man to look for Becky with money I didn’t have. Six months later, he sat at my kitchen table and shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollen. A man who wants to disappear in 1989 can do it.”
“You didn’t find anything?”
“No. I didn’t.”
I had spent what I could not afford, and I still had no address, no name to follow, and no way to reach my daughter. The only thing I could do was stay where she might find me.
I stayed in the same little house in Van Wert, Ohio. My phone number stayed the same too. I had written it down for Becky in her crooked crayon and taped it on the wall by the phone. I answered on the first ring for thirty-eight years.
Wrong numbers. Sales calls. Surveys. Never her.
Now I’m sixty-seven. I live alone, and Thanksgiving is a turkey breast for one. My pill organizer has the days of the week on the lids. I mention that because people imagine waiting as a dramatic act. Most of it was just the same life continuing, with one place in it kept open.
This September, my niece called.
“Aunt Esther, Velma died last month,” she said. “They’re having an estate sale over in Indiana.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“You should go,” she said. “Even if it’s only her old house.”
“I don’t want to see her things.”
“I know. But you might want to.”
I almost didn’t go. I’m not a woman who lets an old grudge keep her home, I told myself. That was a lie. I nearly stayed put.
That Saturday, I drove the forty-five minutes across the state line. The house was full of strangers sorting through Velma’s Corelle and Christmas decorations. By her old chair sat the wicker sewing basket I remembered from 1988. Someone had put a price sticker on its lid.
I opened it because I recognized it.
Under the spools and pincushion were twelve school pictures, wallet-size and held together with a rubber band. The girl in the first was little. In the later ones, she grew older, then into a teenager. Every one had the dimple in her left cheek.
On the backs, in a round schoolgirl hand, were the words “Love, Meredith,” followed by a grade. First grade. Second grade. All the way through twelfth.
I sat down on the floor.
A woman in a visor came over. “Are you okay?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I am not.”
Velma had known. For years, while I asked her where my child was, she had been receiving school pictures.
Under them was a Christmas card envelope from 2021. It said, “Merry Christmas, Grandma Velma. Love, Meredith and Derrick.” There was a return address in Muncie, Indiana, an hour and a half from my front door.
I paid three dollars for the basket. I took the pictures and the envelope home. I didn’t sleep that night.
At two in the morning, I let myself say the thing I had been avoiding: Meredith might shut the door in my face. If I didn’t go, I could keep imagining that she was somewhere wishing for me. That was easier than learning what she actually believed.
At six, I got dressed. I put the twelve pictures in my purse, along with the yellow ribbon I had kept in my jewelry box.
The address led to a brick house with mums on the step and a tricycle in the yard. I stood on the porch long enough for the neighbor’s dog to stop barking at me. Then I knocked.
A tall man in a Colts sweatshirt opened the door. He looked at my face and recognized me.
“You’re Esther,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“She knows who you are,” he added. “She thinks you gave her away.”
“I never gave her anywhere. Her daddy took her.”
“Her daddy’s been dead three years,” he said. “He told her you signed her over and didn’t want her.”
I held on to the door frame.
“Is she here?”
He looked over his shoulder instead of answering. A woman came down the hall, drying her hands on a dish towel. She was forty-three, with a dimple in her left cheek. Her hair was in a braid.
She stopped behind him and looked at me for a long time.
“Daddy told me you signed papers,” she said. “He said you didn’t want me.”
“I never signed you away,” I said. “I went to court to get you back.”
Her eyes moved from my face to the man beside her.
“Derrick,” she said, “let her come in.”
I followed them into the living room. No one sat down right away. I took the pictures from my purse and placed them on the table. Meredith looked at the first one, then at the name on its back.
“Those were in Velma’s sewing basket,” I said. “I found them at the sale.”
“She had all of these?” Meredith asked.
“All twelve.”
Her mouth tightened. “She never showed me pictures of you.”
“I didn’t know she had them.”
Derrick looked at the Christmas envelope. “You came here because of this?”
“Yes. I saw your names and the address. I didn’t know if she’d let me in.”
Meredith sat down. “Dad said you signed papers. He said you wanted a fresh start.”
“I went to court because he took you. I had custody papers by the next spring.” I kept my voice steady, though I was watching her face for any sign she would send me away. “I hired someone to search. He couldn’t find you.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I didn’t have your name or an address. Your father changed both. I asked Velma, and she said she didn’t know where he was.”
Meredith looked down at the school pictures. “She knew where I was.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t add anything. There was nothing I could say that would make the twelve pictures less clear.
“Do you still have the custody papers?” she asked.
“I do.”
I had kept them with the few records I’d held on to from those years. I had brought them because I knew she might need more than my word, though I had been afraid to put them on the table. I took them out and passed them to her.
She read the pages slowly. Derrick leaned over her shoulder, but he didn’t take them from her.
“This says you were given custody,” she said.
“That’s what the judge decided.”
“Dad said you signed me over.”
“I didn’t.”
She looked up. “And you kept looking?”
“I paid a man to look. I stayed at the same address. I kept the same number.”
Meredith held the papers in both hands. “Why would he tell me that?”
“I don’t know why he said it. I know what I did.”
Derrick glanced at her. “You don’t have to answer everything today.”
“I know.” She looked back at me. “I’m trying to understand how both of these things can be true. That he told me one thing, and you’ve got papers saying another.”
“They can’t both be true,” I said. “I’m not asking you to forget what you were told. I’m asking you to look at what I have.”
She turned the pictures over one at a time. Her name and each grade were on the backs. The last picture showed a young woman who was no longer a little girl, but the dimple was the same.
“Grandma got these from me,” Meredith said. “I sent them to her.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Did you ever get anything from her?”
“No. Not one picture. Not one card.”
She looked toward Derrick. He had stayed quiet, giving her room to read and ask. Then she turned back to me.
“I thought you didn’t want me,” she said. “I thought that for a long time.”
“I know.”
That was all I could make myself say. I wanted to tell her what the years had been like, to list every call I had answered and every place I had searched. It would have sounded like an argument for my own case. The pictures and papers were already there.
Meredith pushed the papers back toward me, then pulled them close again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.”
“You don’t have to decide what you feel today.”
Derrick asked if I wanted to sit. I did. We sat in the same room with the twelve pictures spread across the table. Nobody rushed to tidy them away.
Meredith asked about the yellow ribbon in my purse. I took it out and laid it beside the pictures.
“That was in your braid the last time I saw you,” I said.
She touched its edge. “I don’t remember it.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
Her face changed, not into a smile, exactly. She looked down at the ribbon for a while.
“I remember my hair being hard to brush,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that. I tried.”
“It still gets tangled,” she said, and glanced at her braid.
It was the first ordinary thing either of us had said. I was grateful for it.
Meredith didn’t ask me to leave. She didn’t suddenly know how to fit me into her life, either. She asked for the address in Van Wert and the phone number I had never changed. I wrote them down for her.
“I can call,” she said.
“You can.”
“I’m not promising I’ll know what to say.”
“You don’t have to.”
Derrick walked me to the door. Meredith stayed in the living room with the papers and the pictures. Before I left, he said, “She needs time.”
“I understand.”
He looked at me as though he had something else to say, but stopped. I didn’t ask him to explain the years. He hadn’t been there for them.
At home, I put the papers away again. The pictures stayed in my purse until I heard from Meredith. I didn’t want them back in a basket where someone else could decide what I was allowed to know.
She called. We spoke awkwardly at first. She asked about the house in Van Wert and whether I still had the same number. I told her yes. She said she wanted to see me again, and we arranged it. It wasn’t a return to the years we’d lost. They were gone. It was a beginning we could choose now.
I had spent thirty-eight years keeping the line open. This time, when the phone rang, it was Meredith. I answered.
