He moved three streets away from her son’s family and he never once contacted us, because he had promised his mother, in 1981, that he would not put himself in front of Rosalind again, and he is a man who keeps things.
Dean drove out to his mother’s house on Saturday with the folder.
I did not go and he has never given me a full account. What he has told me is this. He put the photograph of the two children on her kitchen table. She looked at it for a long time. And she said, “Where did you get that.”
He said, “Who is she.”
And Rosalind said, “That’s Junie.”
Just like that. No hesitation, no confusion, no pretending. She had been carrying that name in her mouth for sixty-six years, ready to go.
Then she told him a version of it, badly and out of order, over about forty minutes, and at the end of it she said the only sentence out of the entire business that I have ever felt any pity about.
She said, “They took her out the front door and my mother made me look at my arithmetic.”
Dean asked her why she’d said what she said at our table.
She did not answer that. She has never answered it, to him or to me, and I have stopped waiting.
What I think — and this is my opinion and I could be wrong — is that she has spent sixty-six years unable to look directly at what happened to her sister, and that a two-year-old in a red dress twirling in a back yard while a whole street watched and loved her was the single most unbearable thing that could possibly have happened three houses from Wendell Pike’s window.
That is an explanation. I want to be careful here. It is not a defense, and I have never offered it to her as one, and there is a boy in my house who heard what she said about his friend, and I do not get to trade his memory of it for her history.
She has not been back to our table.
She sent Milo a card at Christmas with fifty dollars in it and no note. He put the fifty in the fund and kept the card in the shoebox with the other ones, which I think tells you exactly where he’s landed on it, and he got there without any help from me.
PART 5 — WHAT WENDELL WATCHED
The eighteen thousand four hundred dollars went into an account for Birdie.
That took some doing. Rhonda refused it three times and I don’t blame her; there is a kind of pride that keeps a person upright and I was not going to pry it off her. What finally worked was Wendell, who told her on his own front porch that it was not charity and not a gift to her, and that if she wanted to be useful she could let an old man decide where his own money went for the first time in his life.
It’s in a trust now, structured so it doesn’t wreck her benefits eligibility, which took a lawyer and four months. Birdie’s therapies are paid through the end of elementary school.
The fifty lunchboxes came to about six hundred dollars. That went in too.
Wendell lived fourteen more months, which was longer than anyone told him he would.
Milo went down there most Saturdays. That was not my idea and I want to be honest that I was uneasy about it for the first month, and Officer Kell, who checked in twice more than she needed to, said something to me that settled it: “Ma’am, that man photographed the only thing he could still reach.”
Milo learned to load film. He learned what an f-stop was, at nine, from a man who could not walk to his own mailbox. There are pictures in this house of my son’s ninth birthday that were taken from a second-floor window sixty yards away and they are better than anything I have ever taken with a phone.
Wendell died in September, in the hospital in Corwin Springs, and Dean was there, and Rhonda was there, and Birdie was in the hallway with me eating crackers.
Rosalind did not come.
She came to the funeral. She sat in the third row on the wrong side and left before the reception, and she and Dean did not speak, and I have decided that is between the two of them.
Birdie turned four in April.
Rhonda did a real party this time — the whole street, honestly, half of Bellamy Row in her back yard, because after two years of lunchboxes it had stopped being possible to keep the neighbors out of anything.
Birdie has words now. Not many, and they come hard, and every one of them cost more work than most people put into a degree.
One of them is birthday. She says it as one long joined-up sound and she uses it for anything good — cake, the sprinkler, a dog she likes, the sound of Milo’s bike on the driveway.
She wore the red dress to that party. It doesn’t fit anymore. It came to about the middle of her shins and the satin band sat up under her arms and she would not hear one word about wearing anything else, and Rhonda gave up at nine in the morning.
She grabbed the skirt in both fists and spun until she went down in the grass, exactly like the first time, and about thirty adults on that lawn made a noise like they’d been hit.
That child doesn’t even know what a birthday is.
My mother-in-law said that at my table, holding a four-dollar dress in the air, in front of fourteen people who all looked at their plates.
Her brother was three houses away at his window with a camera he’d bought at an estate sale, keeping the only record anyone kept of a boy being kind to a little girl, because when he was nine years old they took his sister out the front door and nobody wrote any of it down at all.
Birdie knows what a birthday is.
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