Then he explained the money. He wrote that he had no children, that his nieces and nephews had been raised not knowing he existed, and that his estate would otherwise go to the state after the funeral home took what it took.
Then there was one paragraph about Junie, five sentences long, and then a line I have not been able to get out of my head since.
He wrote: I watched that boy go without his lunch for a girl who cannot say his name. I did not know people still did that. I thought it went out with my mother.
The last page was instructions. Where the account was. Who to call. The name of a lawyer he had already spoken to. He had thought about the tax on it. He had written down the phone number of the funeral home and paid the deposit already, in June, so that nobody would have to.
At the very bottom, under his signature, he had written one more line, and then crossed it out, and then written it again underneath the crossing-out, which is the single most human thing in the entire document.
If the boy wants to know how the camera works I am home every day.
PART 4 — THREE HOUSES DOWN
My husband found out he had an uncle when he was forty-one years old, standing in our kitchen, holding a photograph of two children on a porch step.
He found out he’d had an aunt about nine seconds later.
Junie Pike was born in 1955 with Down syndrome. In 1959, when she was four, she was placed at Larchmont State School, which was the standard advice given to families in this state at that time and which was, as we now know and as the state has formally acknowledged, a catastrophe.
Their mother did not want to. Their father did. Wendell was nine and had no vote.
Junie lived there for nineteen years. She died there in 1978 of pneumonia, at twenty-three, and is buried in a numbered plot on the grounds, because that is what they did, and the state put up a memorial with names on it in 2006, and Junie Pike’s name is on it, and Wendell has been out there four times.
Rosalind was seven when her sister was taken away.
The family did not speak of her again. Not at Christmas, not at either parent’s funeral, not once. Wendell told us his mother kept one photograph in a drawer under the linens and that when she died in 1981 he took it, and Rosalind never asked where it went.
He wrote to his sister for fifty years.
Birthdays, mostly. Junie’s birthday, in April, every year. Then, later, whenever something happened — when his wife died, when he got the diagnosis, when he moved to Bellamy Row in 1994.
Every letter came back.
