The Initials on My Sleeve Were Never Mine
The Initials on My Sleeve Were Never Mine
Chapter 2: The Photograph in His Wallet
Dean Pruitt moved fast for a woman in heels. She switched off the microphone, took Mr. Ashworth by the elbow, and steered both of us through a side door into a hallway that smelled like floor wax and vending machine popcorn.
Behind us, the room exploded into whispers.
She opened a small office, the kind used for financial aid appointments, and set two bottles of water on the desk. "Take whatever time you need," she said, and closed the door.
Mr. Ashworth sat down heavily. I stayed standing. My legs didn't feel like mine.
He laid the photograph on the desk between us and turned it so it faced me.
"I took that in August," he said. "The summer before you were born. She'd just finished sewing that dress. I bought her the fabric from Kessler's Dry Goods. She made one for herself first, and she said she'd save the rest of the bolt."
"For what?"
"For the baby." His mouth worked. "She said if it was a girl, she'd make her one just like it."
I looked at the photograph. My mother's hair was longer than I remembered. She was laughing with her whole face, head tipped back. I had forgotten she ever laughed like that.
"Why do you have this in your wallet?" I asked. "Twenty years later."
He didn't answer right away. He twisted the cap of his water bottle on and off.
"Because I never figured out what went wrong," he said.
He told it slowly. They met when she was hemming pants at Fenwick's Upholstery and he was hauling plywood for his father's yard. They saw each other all that summer. In October she told him she was pregnant. He said he was scared, but he wasn't going anywhere.
"Two weeks later, I got a letter," he said. "Her handwriting. It said the baby belonged to somebody else. That she'd been seeing another man the whole time, and she didn't want me calling the house."
"And you believed it."
"My mother said she'd always figured that girl was after the business." He rubbed his eyes. "I was twenty-four. I believed what was easiest."
"Did you ever try to call?"
He looked at the floor.
"Once," he said. "Her mother answered. She said Lacey had moved away and didn't want to hear from me."
Her mother. Nana Ruth.
The fluorescent light above us buzzed. Somewhere down the hall, a vending machine dropped a can with a hollow thunk.
"I don't know you," I said. "I don't know if any of this is real."
"I know." He nodded too many times. "I know that. We can do a test. Whatever you want. I'll pay for—"
"I don't want you to pay for anything."
He flinched. Then he nodded again.
"I kept the letter," he said. "It's at my house. I'd like you to see it."
I took his phone number on the back of the scholarship program and left by the side exit so I wouldn't have to walk past Paige Holloway.
Nana's Buick coughed twice before it started. I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the dress sleeve pulled down over my wrist so I wouldn't have to look at the sparrow.
The kitchen light was on. Nana was still at the table, but the coupons were gone. She had a mug of tea in front of her that wasn't steaming anymore.
"Marjorie Pruitt called," she said before I'd set my purse down.
So she already knew.
"Is it true?" I asked.
"Is what true?"
"Nana."
She set the mug down very carefully. "That man has had a lot of years to make up stories about your mother."
"He said he called here. He said you told him she didn't want to talk to him."
"Lots of men called here." Her voice stayed flat and calm, the voice she used on bill collectors. "Your mother had a lot of company in those days. You were too young to know."
"You told me she ran off with a trucker."
"And she did."
"He has a photograph of her in this dress. He bought the fabric."
Nana's eyes went to my sleeve. Just for a second. Then back to my face.
"You're tired," she said. "You've had a big night, and some rich man got sentimental at a podium and turned your head. Go to bed, Wren. We'll talk when you're thinking clearly."
"I am thinking clearly."
"Don't take that tone in my kitchen."
She stood and rinsed her mug, slow, deliberate, her back to me. When she walked past me into the hall, I saw her hand grip the doorframe on the way through, hard enough that her knuckles went white.
I lay in bed with the dress still on, staring at the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Ohio.
Around midnight, I heard a sound I'd never heard in that house in thirteen years.
The small brass key turning in the hall closet lock.
Chapter 3: The Shoebox in the Cedar Chest
Nana played bingo at St. Bernadette's every Saturday from one to four. She had not missed a Saturday since my grandfather passed, not for snow, not for her bad hip, not for the time the Buick's alternator went and she rode with Mrs. Delancey from next door.
That Saturday she stood in the kitchen doorway with her purse on her arm for a long time.
"You working today?" she asked.
"Two to eight."
She looked at me. I looked at my cereal.
"There's chicken in the freezer for tonight," she said, and left.
I called Dolores at the Suds & Spin and asked her to cover my shift. She didn't ask why. Dolores never asked why.
The hall closet key wasn't on Nana's ring. I knew that ring by heart. It took me forty minutes to find it, taped inside the lid of the Folgers can where she kept rubber bands, under a layer of twist ties.
The closet smelled like mothballs and old wool. Winter coats. The vacuum. And on the floor at the back, my grandfather's cedar chest, the one Nana always said was full of blankets.
It was full of blankets. Under the blankets were three shoeboxes, held shut with brittle rubber bands.
I sat down on the hall carpet and opened the first one.
Envelopes. Dozens of them. All addressed in the same slanted handwriting, the handwriting from my mother's grocery lists I'd kept in a drawer for years.
Miss Wren Talley, 418 Gable Street, Calder Falls.
Every envelope had been opened. Neatly, along the top, with a knife.
The return address was a place called Marlow Springs. The earliest postmark was from the November after she left. The latest was from this past March.
I unfolded the first one with fingers that wouldn't hold still.
My sweet girl. I am at a place called Harbor House. It is a hospital for people who got sick the way I got sick. I hurt my back at the plant and the pills the doctor gave me stopped being medicine and started being the only thing I thought about. I left because I didn't want you to see me like that. I am getting better. I will come home the minute they say I'm well. Mama says you're doing good in school. I love you more than every star.
I read it three times. Then I opened the next one. And the next.
She wrote about her roommate who snored. About learning to sew again with hands that didn't shake. About the day she got her one-year chip. Every birthday card had a money order folded inside, twenty dollars, then thirty, then fifty. The stubs were in the box. Every one of them had been cashed.
Around the fourth year, the letters changed.
Mama says you asked her to stop sending these. She says you get upset and don't want reminders. I understand, baby. I won't push. But I'm going to keep writing on your birthday, and if you ever want to open one, I'll be right here.
I had never asked anyone to stop anything. I had been eleven years old and I had cried into a pillow every birthday, wondering why she never even sent a card.
The second shoebox was different. No letters. Bank deposit slips, stapled together by year. Four hundred dollars, every month, deposited into Nana's savings at Calder Falls Federal. Paper-clipped to the top bundle was a single typed page on heavy cream stationery.
Per our agreement of November 3rd, payments will continue so long as no contact is made between the child or her mother and any member of the Ashworth family. E. Ashworth.
The payments ran for twelve years. They stopped the year I turned twelve.
The year, I realized slowly, that Nana paid off the mortgage.
I don't know how long I sat on the hall carpet. The light through the front window moved across the floor and up the wall. The refrigerator rattled on and off, on and off.
At three-fifteen, a gray pickup pulled up to the curb. Dale Ashworth got out holding a manila folder against his chest like a shield.
I opened the door before he could knock.
"I wasn't sure I should come," he said. "You didn't call."
"Show me the letter."
He handed me the folder. Inside was a single sheet of lined notebook paper, yellowed, folded in thirds.
The baby isn't yours, Dale. There's somebody else and there has been all along. Don't call the house. Don't come by. Let me go.
I stared at it.
It wasn't my mother's slanted hand. It was round and careful, with tight little loops on every y and g.
I had watched that handwriting fill out coupon envelopes my whole life.
"Wren?" Dale said. "What is it?"
"My mother didn't write this," I said. "My grandmother did."
Chapter 4: What Nana Kept
Nana's Buick came up Gable Street at four-twenty. I watched it from the kitchen window. I watched her see Dale's gray pickup at the curb. I watched her sit in the driveway with the engine off for almost three full minutes before she opened the door.
Dale had offered to stay. I'd asked him to wait in his truck.
I had laid everything out on the kitchen table the way she laid out bills on the first of the month. Letters in one row, sorted by year. Deposit slips in another. The cream stationery with E. Ashworth at the bottom. And at the end of the table, by itself, the lined notebook page with the round, careful loops.
Nana came in, set her purse on the counter, and looked at the table.
She didn't say anything. She took off her coat and hung it on the hook by the back door. She filled the kettle and set it on the burner. The gas caught with a soft pop.
"You went in my closet," she said.
"You locked it last night. You've never locked it."
"That's my private property."
"Those letters have my name on them."
She turned around then. Her face looked the way it always did, steady and plain, but there was a small muscle jumping near her left eye.
"Your mother was a drug addict, Wren," she said. "Do you know what that means? Do you know what it's like to find your daughter on the bathroom floor with a two-year-old pounding on the door? Because I do."
"She got better. It's all right here. Eleven years sober."
"She said she was better a lot of times."
"You told her I didn't want her letters."
"I protected you."
"You told me she ran off with a trucker."
"Would you have rather heard the truth? That she was locked up in some clinic two counties over, crying into the phone every Sunday?" Nana's voice rose for the first time. "You were seven. I made a choice."
The kettle started to tick as the water heated.
I picked up the cream page and held it out.
"And this? Was this a choice?"
She didn't take it. She didn't need to.
"Evelyn Ashworth came to this house," she said finally, quieter. "Lacey was four months along. That woman sat right where you're standing in a camel coat that cost more than this kitchen. She said her son had prospects. She said a girl like Lacey would drag him down, and she'd see to it one way or another. She said she could make life hard for us, or she could make it easier."
"So you took her money."
"Your grandfather was dying, Wren." Nana's chin lifted. "Lung cancer. No insurance worth the name. We were two payments from losing this house. I had a pregnant daughter who couldn't keep a job and a husband coughing blood into a coffee can. So yes. I took her money."
"And you wrote the letter."
The muscle by her eye jumped again.
"Lacey was going to tell him she'd changed her mind," she said. "She was going to marry him. Run off to that big house and let his mother rip her apart. I wrote it so she wouldn't have to."
"You wrote it so you'd keep getting paid."
Nana's face went white.
"I kept the lights on in this house for thirteen years," she said, her voice shaking now. "I packed your lunches. I sat up with you through strep throat and chicken pox and that boy in tenth grade. I let out that dress twice with my own hands. Where was he? Where was Dale Ashworth for any of it?"
"He didn't know about me."
"He didn't look." She pointed at the window, at the pickup idling at the curb. "One phone call. That's all he ever made. One. A man who wants his child makes more than one phone call."
That landed somewhere in my ribs, and it stayed there, because some part of me knew it was true.
The kettle began to whistle, thin and rising. Neither of us moved to take it off.
"You let me think she didn't love me," I said. My voice came out barely louder than the kettle. "Every birthday. Every Christmas. You watched me wait by that mailbox, and you had her cards in a box in the closet."
Nana's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
For a moment she looked very old. Older than seventy-three. Her hands, the hands that had let out my seams, hung at her sides like they didn't belong to her.
"I didn't know how to stop," she said. "Once it started. I didn't know how to give it back."
I reached past her and turned off the burner. The whistle died slowly, sinking to a hiss.
Then I picked up the first shoebox and the second, stacked them in my arms, and walked to the back door.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"I don't know yet."
"Wren. This is your home."
I stopped with my hand on the screen door. The hinge squeaked, the way it had squeaked my whole life.
"I know," I said. "That's what makes it so hard."
I spent that night on Dolores's pullout couch above the laundromat, listening to the dryers below thump through their last cycles, reading my mother's letters one by one until the window went gray.
Chapter 5: The Alterations Shop on Weller Street
The bus to Marlow Springs left from the Calder Falls depot at 6:40 on Monday morning and took three hours and twelve minutes, with stops in two towns I had never heard of.
Dale had texted twice the night before. The first one said he could drive me. The second one said he understood if I wanted to go alone, but would I let him buy the ticket.
I bought my own ticket. Twenty-eight dollars, which was most of a shift.
I wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and I folded the blue dress into my backpack. I don't know why. I think I wanted proof.
The last return address on my mother's letters was 212 Weller Street. When I got there, it wasn't an apartment. It was a narrow brick storefront between a bail bonds office and a nail salon. Hand-painted letters on the glass said Stitch & Hem Alterations. A cardboard sign in the window said Back in 5 Min, but the door was unlocked and the bell jangled when I pushed it open.
The shop smelled like steam and machine oil. Racks of plastic-wrapped clothes hung along one wall with paper tickets pinned to the sleeves. A radio in the back was playing country music low.
A woman came out from behind a curtain with a measuring tape around her neck and three pins pressed between her lips.
"Be right with you, hon," she said around the pins, then looked up.
She stopped walking.
Her hair was shorter, streaked with gray at the part. There were lines around her mouth that hadn't been there. But it was the face from the photograph. It was the face from every birthday I had ever tried to picture in the dark.
She took the pins out of her mouth one at a time and set them on the counter in a careful little row.
"Wren," she said.
I couldn't make my voice work. I pulled the dress out of my backpack and laid it on the counter between us.
She put her hand flat on it. Then she lifted the left cuff and ran her thumb over the sparrow.
"You kept it," she whispered.
"I wore it Friday night," I said. "To an awards banquet. Dale Ashworth saw the sleeve."
Her eyes snapped up to mine.
"He's the one who funds my scholarship," I said. "He stood up in front of everybody."
My mother sat down hard on the stool behind the counter. She pressed her fingers against her mouth.
"I opened your letters," I said. "All of them. Saturday. Nana had them in a shoebox in the closet."
"She said you didn't want them."
"I know."
"She said you cried every time one came, and it was hurting you, and if I loved you, I'd stop." Her voice was very steady, the way a person talks when they've learned that losing control costs too much. "I came once. When you were fourteen. I sat in my car across from Calder Falls High for two hours and watched you walk out with a girl in a red jacket. You were laughing. I thought, she's all right. She's laughing. Who am I to walk up and wreck that?"
"I wasn't all right," I said. "I waited for you every birthday."
She closed her eyes.
We talked for two hours. She flipped the sign to Closed. She made instant coffee in a microwave in the back room and we drank it out of mismatched mugs. I told her about Nana's letter to Dale. About the deposit slips. About Evelyn Ashworth in her camel coat.
My mother listened to all of it. Then she shook her head slowly.
"The letter I didn't know about," she said. "But Dale did hear from me."
The coffee went cold in my hands.
"After I got clean, the first year, I called the lumberyard twice. His mother answered both times and hung up. So the third time, I went in person." She turned her mug in a slow circle. "Calder Falls courthouse. He was there for something about a permit. I said his name. He turned around and looked right at me."
"And?"
"And he looked away." She said it without anger, which was somehow worse. "He walked out the side door. I figured that was my answer."
I took out my phone. My thumb hovered for a long moment. Then I called him.
He picked up on the first ring. "Wren? Are you okay?"
"Were you at the county courthouse eleven years ago? Did my mother say your name in the hallway?"
The silence stretched so long I thought the call had dropped.
"Yes," he said finally. "My mother told me she'd been arrested. Pills. I was engaged by then. I didn't—" His breath shook. "I didn't want to know."
I hung up without saying goodbye.
My mother reached across the counter and touched the curtain-scrap patch on the hem of the dress.
"Whoever fixed this," she said softly, "did it with a lot of love."
"That was me," I said.
She held on to the hem, and then she held on to my hand, and neither of us let go for a long time.
Chapter 6: What I Chose to Keep
The DNA results came in a plain white envelope three weeks later, addressed to me care of the Suds & Spin, because I didn't want them going to Gable Street.
Ninety-nine point nine eight percent.
I read the number standing between two rows of dryers, and I didn't feel the way I'd thought I would. I didn't feel anything at first. Then I felt tired. Tired the way you feel after carrying something heavy up a long flight of stairs and setting it down, only to realize there's another flight.
I met Dale at the Lantern Diner on Route 9 the following Sunday. He was already in the corner booth when I got there, two coffees on the table, one of them going cold.
"I didn't know how you take it," he said.
"Black's fine."
He slid the envelope's twin across the table. His own copy. He had folded and unfolded it so many times the creases had gone soft.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For the courthouse. For all of it. I've been trying to figure out how to say that in a way that means something, and I don't think there is one."
"There isn't."
He nodded. He looked down at his hands. They were big, scarred across the knuckles, a working man's hands even after thirty years of owning the yard.
"My mother passed four years ago," he said. "I went through her papers. I found a checkbook register with a line every month. Four hundred dollars. Memo line just said R.T." He let out a breath. "I didn't put it together. I didn't want to."
"You keep saying that."
"I know." He met my eyes. "It's the truest thing I've got."
The waitress came by and refilled his cup. We both waited until she was gone.
"I want to help," he said. "Tuition, the car, whatever you need. You don't have to call me anything. You don't have to see me. I just—"
"I'm keeping the scholarship," I said.
He blinked.
"I earned it. Dean Pruitt told me the committee picked me before you ever saw my name." I wrapped both hands around the coffee mug. "So I'm keeping it. But I don't want anything else. Not right now. I don't want to owe you, and I don't want you buying your way past the part where you have to earn it."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he nodded, slowly.
"How do I earn it?" he asked.
"Call my mother," I said. "Apologize to her first. Then we'll see."
He didn't argue. I watched him take that in like a man swallowing something bitter on purpose.
Two days later, on my last day of finals, Paige Holloway stopped me in the hallway outside the library. She had her car keys in her hand and kept spinning the ring around one finger.
"I heard," she said. "About everything."
"Most people did."
"I didn't know your mom made that dress." She looked at the floor. "I wouldn't have said that."
"You would have said it about somebody else's," I said.
She opened her mouth, closed it, and nodded once. Then she walked off toward the parking lot. It wasn't much. But it was more than I'd expected, and I let it be enough.
The last thing I did before leaving for Halvorsen State was drive Nana's Buick back to Gable Street to return it.
She was on the front porch in her housecoat with her bad hip propped on a footstool. The ironing board leaned against the porch rail beside her. Someone had screwed a new leg onto it, a piece of pine that didn't match.
"Mrs. Delancey's grandson fixed it," she said. "Took him ten minutes. I don't know why I waited two years."
I set the car keys on the porch rail.
"I'm not here to say it's okay," I said.
"I know you're not."
"I don't know when I'll be back."
She nodded. Her hands moved in her lap, folding and refolding the hem of her housecoat. Then she reached into the pocket and pulled out an envelope. Her round, careful handwriting on the front. Just my name.
"You don't have to read it," she said. "I just needed one letter with your name on it to make it to you."
I took it. I didn't open it.
I put it in my backpack, beside the blue dress, and I walked down the porch steps without looking back. Not because I didn't love her. Because I did, and I needed some distance to figure out what that meant now.
Epilogue
My mother finished the new sleeve on a Thursday in late October, in the back room of Stitch & Hem, with the radio playing low and rain ticking against the alley window.
I had driven down from Halvorsen State on a borrowed car for the weekend. She'd unpicked my curtain-scrap patches one by one and replaced them with fabric from the last of the original bolt. She had kept it in a garment bag for twenty years, through Harbor House and three apartments and the day she signed the lease on this shop.
"I told you I'd save it," she said. "I just didn't know what for."
The old cuff was gone, but she'd cut the sparrow out with a careful margin and stitched it onto the new sleeve. Under the D.A. she'd added two more letters in the same brown thread.
L.T.
And under those, smaller, W.T.
"Three birds now," she said, smoothing the cuff flat with her thumb.
Dale calls her sometimes. She told me he cried the first time, the kind of crying that sounds like it's been stuck for decades. She hasn't decided what she thinks of him. Neither have I. He sends me a text every Sunday asking how my week went, and most Sundays I answer, and some Sundays I don't. He hasn't once complained about the ones I don't.
Nana's letter is still in my desk drawer at school, unopened. Some nights I take it out and hold it and put it back. I'll read it when I'm ready. She, of all people, taught me that a letter can wait a long time and still say what it needs to.
I wore the dress to the Halvorsen State fall honors reception. Nobody laughed. A girl from my chemistry lab asked where I'd bought it.
"My mom made it," I said.
It was the first time in thirteen years those words didn't hurt.
I used to think the initials on my sleeve belonged to everyone but me. A man I'd never met. A woman who'd left. Promises somebody else had made and somebody else had broken.
But I was the one who wore it. I was the one who patched it on the bus step and pressed it on a bath towel and walked the length of a room with two hundred people watching.
Some things get handed to you. Some things you have to keep stitching back together yourself until they finally belong to you.
May you like
The End
