Six Left Behind Daughters and One Returned White Box Fifteen Years Later

“How many?” I asked.

“I saw them on her dresser under her jewelry box,” Lucille said. “One was postmarked two weeks ago. Adele thinks we do not notice, but she isn’t the only one who cleans the upstairs rooms.”

“She is twenty-eight, Lucille. She can receive her own mail.”

“It is not just mail,” Lucille said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “It is her. The woman who left us with six baskets of laundry and forty dollars in the cookie jar.”

She threw the envelope onto the dining room table, where it slid across the polished dark wood and stopped near the salt shaker.

“Are you going to let her come to the church?” Lucille asked.

“It is Adele’s wedding,” I said.

“It is our house,” Lucille said. “And she does not belong in it.”

She turned and walked into the kitchen, her boots loud on the linoleum.

The smell of beef stew came from the kitchen at six, a warm, thick scent of onions and carrots that filled the small dining room. Shannon, my youngest at fifteen, was sliding the paper napkins into the clear plastic rings we used for Sunday dinners.

“Do you remember the day she left, Dad?” Shannon asked.

She did not look up from her hands, which were busy twisting her blue beaded bracelet around her left wrist.

“You were very small, Shannon,” I said. “You were barely three.”

“I remember the green suitcase,” she said. “The one with the broken latch that you tied with the yellow clothesline.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“Did she say goodbye to me?” Shannon whispered. “Or did she just go while I was asleep in the crib?”

I reached for the heavy ceramic plates in the sideboard cupboard, my left wrist bare where my wedding band used to be. My fingers stayed on the cold edge of the plates for several seconds before I could pull them down.

“She had a train to catch,” I said.

“Lucille says she left because she was tired of being a mother,” Shannon said. “She says we were too loud.”

“Lucille does not remember everything,” I said.

“But Adele does,” Shannon said. “Adele was thirteen. She remembers the taxi.”