My sister showed up on my step at ten to four on a school day with her three-year-old asleep against her neck, and I hadn’t got the chain off when she said, “Everything they told me about her is WRONG.”
TWELVE years of clinics to get that little girl. She started at twenty-seven and finished with a loan against the house.
Lynette calls ahead. She texts from the stoplight on County Road 9, every single time.
She was always the planner. Color-coded binders, every handout read twice, tabs on the tabs.
When a specialist said it would never happen on its own, the county foster list felt like a cracked window.
I did the driving the day she met Josie. A tiny thing with dark blond curls who never said a WORD the whole visit and hung on to Lynette’s thumb anyway.
“Robin, look at her,” Lynette said out by the car, crying into the cuff of her jacket.
The next eight months were GOOD. Josie started the Methodist preschool, they ordered school pictures in three sizes, and every weekend my sister called sounding twenty.
That May, Troy picked up two spit kits on clearance next to the drugstore reading glasses, since his dad’s side swore they were Welsh.
Lynette ran a swab for Josie too.
For the scrapbook.
The plastic tube hadn’t left her jacket pocket, and the page she’d printed at work was folded small behind it.
She set Josie on the rug in my front room with the toy tractor and slid the pocket door closed.
She DOESN’T shut doors.
I had a potholder on one hand and never took it off.
“They lied,” she said.
“Lied how,” I said. “Wendy? The whole county?”
She pressed the page flat with her palm. Then a second time, as if the fold lines were what was wrong.
“About Josie,” she said. “About EVERYTHING.”
Her left eye had gone puffy where she’d been rubbing it.
“HOW DID THEY LIE, Lyn,” I said.
She glanced at the pocket door.
Then she spun the page toward me and put one fingertip below the third line.
She said six words, and I made her say them again.
Her six words turned every one of my relatives into a liar.
The Third Line
“She’s Kyle’s,” Lynette said. “Josie is our niece.”
The first time, the words went straight past me. I told her to say it again, and she did, the same six words, only flatter.
I looked down at the page.
The top line was Josie’s name the way Lynette had typed it into Troy’s account, first and middle. The second line said four close family matches. The third said Kyle Paulsen, and beside it, in small gray letters, parent/child.
Below Kyle was our mother. Connie Paulsen, grandparent.
Below our mother was my sister. Lynette Stroud, aunt.
Below Lynette was me.
My sister had read it at her desk on her lunch break. She had read that she was her own daughter’s aunt, and then she had printed it, folded it, and driven to preschool to pick Josie up.
I took the potholder off. I don’t remember deciding to.
“Kyle,” I said.
“Kyle,” she said.
My little brother is thirty-one. He rents the house our dad owns out past the grain elevator and works second shift at the feed mill. His girlfriend, Brittany, moved back to Springfield three years ago, and according to our mother, she lost the baby at five months.
I could still see my mother telling me. She did it at my counter, in a low voice, with her hand around my wrist, as if she was sparing me something.
“Brittany didn’t lose anything,” Lynette said.
Behind the pocket door, Josie was making the tractor noise she makes, a hum with her lips pressed together.
Lynette checked the door again. She kept making sure it was shut.
“How does a spit kit even find him,” I said.
“The holidays two years ago,” she said. “She made all four of us do one. For her tree. Remember?”
I remembered. The tubes lined up on the dining table with masking tape on the caps and our names in her square capitals.
I remembered one more thing, and I could tell by Lynette’s face she’d gotten there before me.
The fall Brittany went to Springfield was the same fall our mother drove over to Lynette’s with a church bulletin and a phone number written on the back of it. A woman named Wendy. A caseworker who sat three pews up from her.
“She said she knew somebody,” Lynette said. “Somebody who could help move my file along.”
Behind the door, the hum stopped, then started again.
How many people at our holiday table had known Josie’s face before my sister ever saw it?
The Binder on My Bookshelf
My mother has kept the same family binder since before I was born. Navy blue, three inches thick, the rings sprung so the pages never lie flat.
The Paulsens and their in-laws each get a page. A photo, a birthday, a wedding date if there is one, and a box at the bottom for children, which she fills in with a sharp pencil so she can fix it later.
That spring she carried it up my steps in a grocery bag and set it on my bookshelf between the phone books and the cookbooks.
“For your dad’s seventieth,” she said. “Scan the pictures and make one of those slideshows. Robin’s good at that.”
She said it to the room, as if I wasn’t standing in it.
I’m not good at that. I’m the one who doesn’t say no.
For two months I did a page a night at the kitchen table after work. My grandfather in his army jacket. Lynette at her eighth-grade graduation with a perm she still blames on me. Kyle at two with a cereal bowl on his head and milk running down his ears.
The front pocket of the binder had an index card in it with every password my mother has ever made up, printed in the same capitals as the masking tape. Her email. Her bank. The pharmacy refill line. The spit kit site.
The password for that one was my dad’s truck plate backward.
I remembered the night she did the tubes. The holidays, the dishes still out, the gravy boat pushed to one end of the dining table while she read the instructions out loud like a recipe.
My dad refused and went to watch the game. That left her and the three of us kids.
Lynette spat first and made a face. I went second.
Kyle went last. He held the empty tube a long time, turning it in his fingers, looking at the tape with his name on it.
“This is for my tree, Kyle,” she said. “Relax. Nobody’s looking for you.”
He spat, and she took the tube out of his hand before he’d got the cap all the way on.
Kyle’s page was near the back. A paper clip held a white envelope flat against it, the kind bills come in, sealed.
I scanned the photo above the clip and left the envelope alone. Kyle’s business, I figured. The fall Brittany left had been hard enough on him.
The box for children on Kyle’s page had been erased so many times the paper had gone soft and gray, almost fuzzy, like the knees of old jeans.
I noticed that. I didn’t think about it.
When I finished the slideshow, I emailed it to my mother and put the binder back on the shelf.
It was there the whole time Lynette sat at my table, right behind her shoulder.
A Phone Call About Spit Kits
Lynette left at a quarter past six with Josie asleep again and the tractor in her fist.
Troy came for them in the truck. He didn’t get out. He lifted two fingers off the wheel at me, which is about all Troy ever says, and his face told me Lynette had already called him.
Lynette said one thing on the step. “Promise me you won’t call anybody.”
I didn’t. My mother called me.
She was on the cordless in her kitchen at eight. I could hear the dishwasher running behind her.
“Hon, I need my binder back,” she said. “Tomorrow, if you can manage it.”
“The party isn’t for three weeks,” I said.
“I know when my own husband’s party is.”
She told me about the sheet cake. She told me my dad’s cousin was driving up from Joplin with his new wife, the one with the dogs.
Then she said, the way you’d bring up rain: “Did Troy ever do that spit thing he was going on about at the anniversary?”
I hadn’t told her about Troy’s kits. Lynette hadn’t. Lynette would have said so on my step, in the same breath as promise me.
“How come,” I said.
“Oh, I got some email from that company. Junk, probably. I don’t even know how to open those.”
She knew how to open them. Her passwords were on an index card in the front pocket of the binder she wanted back by tomorrow.
“When did it come,” I said.
“A while ago. Few weeks. Does it matter?”
A few weeks.
Those few weeks, she sat in the second row at Josie’s end-of-year program in the Methodist fellowship hall and clapped when the three-year-olds did the wheels on the bus. She bought Josie a pair of pink jelly sandals at the Walmart and brought them over with the tag still on. She kept Josie overnight so Lynette and Troy could see a movie in Chillicothe and eat somewhere with tablecloths.
“I’ll look for the binder,” I said.
“That binder’s on your bookshelf, Robin. I saw it there last time.”
“I’ll look,” I said.
She hung up first. She always hangs up first.
I stood in my kitchen with the phone still in my hand and thought about the sandals. Pink, size eight toddler, a plastic bow on each strap.
For three weeks she’d had that email, and in the middle of them she’d bought Josie sandals.
The Rental by the Grain Elevator
I drove out to Kyle’s the next morning at ten, which is when second shift is up and nobody else comes by.
He was on the back step in a gray mill shirt with a mug on his knee. He saw my car and didn’t get up.
I didn’t say hello. I held my phone out with the picture of the page Lynette had let me take before she left.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he set the mug down on the step, careful, like it was full, and it was empty.
“Took long enough,” he said.
“How long have you known,” I said.
“The whole time, Robin. How long do you think.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“Brittany couldn’t keep a houseplant alive back then,” he said. “And look at this place.”
He tipped his head at the rental. The gutter hanging off the corner. Our dad’s old mower in the weeds by the propane tank.
“I wasn’t bringing a baby out here,” he said.
“So you signed,” I said.
“I signed whatever they put in front of me. Connie had it handled.”
My brother has never in his life called her Connie.
“She sat at that hospital two days,” he said. “She held her. I went out and sat in the truck. The old man drove Brittany back to Springfield when it was done, and nobody said her name at the table again.”
“And Lynette,” I said.
“That was the deal.” He picked the mug up and put it back down. “Connie said Lyn would take her quicker if she didn’t know. Said Lyn would feel like it was charity, taking my kid. And once it was final, she’d sit her down and tell her.”
“Final,” I said.
“Her word.”
My mother and our dad and my brother. Three years. One deal.
“Josie calls you Uncle Kyle,” I said.
“I know what she calls me.”
He looked at the grain elevator for a while. The dryer fans were going, a low roar you stop hearing if you live out there.
“I told her to tell Lyn,” he said. “Twice. At the Fourth, and again when Josie started at that preschool. She said I could find my own place if I was going to open my mouth.”
“Your own place,” I said.
“I don’t pay rent here, Robin. I haven’t since.”
He finally looked at me, and I saw he’d been waiting for this car to pull in for three years.
“And me,” I said.
“The only two who didn’t know were you and Lyn,” he said. “She figured you’d tell.”
The Paper Clip on Kyle’s Page
I got home a little after eleven and took the binder off the shelf.
Kyle’s page was where I’d left it, near the back, with the envelope still clipped on.
I didn’t open the envelope first. I held the page up to the window over my sink.
The light came through the soft gray patch where the box for children was. Under all that erasing, the pencil had pressed hard enough to leave a groove in the paper, and the groove said Josephine.
Below it, in the same groove, a date. The same month and day my sister had read me off Josie’s paperwork the first night Josie slept at her house, so I’d have it for birthdays. The year was three years back.
My mother had written my niece’s name in her binder before my sister had ever heard it.
Then she’d erased it, over and over, until the paper wore through to fuzz.
I slid the paper clip off.
The envelope held a small pink card from a hospital nursery, the kind they tape to the end of the bassinet. Girl. 6 lb 11 oz. A time of birth in blue ballpoint.
Behind it was a photo printed at the drugstore. My mother in a vinyl hospital recliner, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, holding a newborn in a striped blanket against her chest. She was looking at the baby, not at whoever took the picture.
Behind that was an index card in her square capitals. Wendy’s name. A phone number. Under that, smaller, she had written L’s file and move it up, and under that, leave Kyle off.
I stood at my sink a long time with the three of them lined up on the counter.
A little before one, my mother’s Buick pulled into my driveway.
I put the card and the photo back in the envelope, clipped it on, shut the binder and slid it into the grocery bag it came in. I carried the bag to the laundry room, set it inside the dryer and closed the door.
She was on my step in her good raincoat with her keys in her hand.
“I was going by,” she said.
“I haven’t found it yet,” I said.
She looked past me at the bookshelf. At the gap between the phone books and the cookbooks.
“It was right there,” she said.
“I’ll keep looking,” I said.
She stood there long enough that the storm door started to swing shut against her arm. Then she told me to tell Lynette hello and walked back to the Buick.
When she was gone, I called my sister.
“Tomorrow night, at the house,” I said. “All of them. Say it’s about the party.”
“For what,” Lynette said.
“The page from Troy’s account,” I said. “Have it with you.”
I didn’t tell her what was in the dryer.
The Table on Cedar Lane
We went at six. Troy stayed home with Josie.
My mother had made a pot roast, because she believes nothing bad can happen to a family that’s eating pot roast.
My dad was already at his end of the table. Kyle came in late and stood by the refrigerator in his work boots and didn’t sit.
Lynette put the page on the tablecloth between the salt and the rolls.
My mother looked at it and kept dishing carrots.
“Honey,” she said. “Those companies get half of it wrong. They sell your spit to who knows who. And Troy bought those off a clearance rack, for heaven’s sake. Getting this worked up over a computer?”
“Connie,” my dad said.
“I’m talking, Stan.”
Lynette didn’t answer. Her hands were in her lap.
I took the binder out of the grocery bag, opened it to Kyle’s page, and set it on the tablecloth in front of my mother with the envelope on top.
I didn’t say anything either.
She didn’t touch it. She reached up to her hair for her reading glasses, and they weren’t there, and she put her hand back down on the tablecloth.
“So you went through my things,” she said.
We let that sit.
“Twelve years,” she said. “Twelve years your sister sat in that chair right there and cried into my dish towels. I drove her to every one of those clinics in the city. I paid for two of them myself, don’t think I didn’t. I sat in those waiting rooms with the fish tanks.”
She pointed at the refrigerator without looking at Kyle.
“And then that one brings home a girl who can’t stay off whatever she’s on that week, and she’s pregnant, and anybody with eyes could see that baby was never going home with either of them. Anybody. And what was I supposed to do? Let her go to some couple in Kirksville with a swimming pool and a golden retriever? Let Lynette keep crying in my kitchen until she’s fifty?”
“Connie,” my dad said again.
“I made one phone call. One. To a woman I’ve known thirty years. I didn’t break anything. I didn’t steal anybody. I made sure my granddaughter came home to my daughter, and I did it the only way it was ever going to work.”
“I’d have taken her anyway,” Lynette said.
It was the first thing she’d said since we sat down.
“Easy to say now,” our mother said. “You’d have done exactly what you’re doing right this minute. You’d have made it about Kyle. You’d have looked at that baby and seen him and that girl and all of it. I wanted you to look at her and see yours. And you did. You love that child more than any of the rest of you have ever loved anything, and I gave you that. I did.”
“You wrote her name in pencil,” Lynette said. “Before I ever met her.”
“Brittany wanted to call her something off a soap opera. I wasn’t having it.”
“And you gave me the house,” Kyle said from the refrigerator.
My mother turned all the way around in her chair for that one.
“You took the house,” she said. “Quit standing in my kitchen acting like you didn’t take the house.”
My dad put his fork down.
“Goddamn it, Connie,” he said, and that was all he said, and he said it to his plate.
She turned back and held her hand out across the table, flat, palm up.
“That’s my binder,” she said. “Give it here.”
I closed it with the envelope inside and slid it the other way across the tablecloth, to my sister.
My mother watched it go.
“Then don’t bother coming to your father’s party,” she said to me. “I mean it, Robin. I won’t have you at his table after you went through my things behind my back.”
I looked at my dad.
He looked at his plate.
He didn’t say one word for me.
The Tab in Lynette’s Binder
The morning after the pot roast, I drove my mother’s binder back to her house in its grocery bag and left it on the porch glider.
Kyle’s page wasn’t in it. I’d handed that to Lynette in my car at the end of Cedar Lane, envelope and all, and watched her zip it inside her jacket.
My mother didn’t call about the missing page. She didn’t call about anything.
My dad turned seventy three weeks later at the VFW hall, with the sheet cake and the cousin from Joplin and the wife with the dogs. I wasn’t there.
My cousin Vicki texted me afterward. They’d run the slideshow, she said. My slideshow, the one I’d emailed in the spring. The last slide was gone, the one that said made by Robin with a little heart after it.
Lynette didn’t go either. Troy took Josie over the next afternoon with a card. He said my dad got down on the living room carpet and ran that tractor back and forth with her for an hour, and my mother stayed in the kitchen the whole time with the water running.
The week before the signing, Lynette made copies of the page from Troy’s account and everything in Kyle’s envelope and put them in a manila envelope addressed to the county.
“I’m not starting her out on something I hid,” she said.
I drove it over myself and handed it across the counter on the first floor. The phone never rang about it. The signing stayed on the calendar.
The signing was seven weeks after the afternoon on my step. I drove Lynette and Josie, and Troy met us there from work.
Josie wore a yellow dress with a duck on the pocket and carried the tractor in with her, and nobody told her to leave it in the car.
Kyle texted me while I was parking. tell lyn congrats. tell her im sorry. No capitals, the way he’s typed since high school.
I held the phone out to Lynette. She read it twice. She didn’t answer it, and she didn’t hand it back right away, either.
The signing went fast. Lynette signed where they showed her, and Troy signed under her, and Josie drove the tractor along the edge of the desk the whole time.
Afterward in the car, Lynette had her own binder open on her knees. Hers is white, with color-coded tabs. Josie, preschool. Josie, doctor. Josie, county.
She took a blank tab out of her purse, the kind with a little paper insert, and wrote family on the insert in pen.
She clicked the rings open. She put in Kyle’s page, with the soft gray box and the groove that said Josephine. She put the pink nursery card in a sheet protector, and the photo of our mother in the hospital recliner behind it.
Then she clicked the rings shut and set the binder on the floor by her feet.
In the back seat, Josie ran the tractor up and down her car seat strap and hummed it the whole way home.
If this one sat heavy with you, send it to the sister who’d drive you to the county building.
If you’re looking for more tales of family drama, check out how I Unloaded Salt Blocks Overnight And My Parents Called It A Hobby, or read about The Disconnect Notice Rode Beside The Claim Form The Whole Lunch and how The Tissue Paper Smelled Of His Mother’s Cedar Closet.
