A woman in a good grey coat stood on my porch on a Tuesday and said my dead best friend’s name like a QUESTION.
Behind me the washer was running and there were six lunchboxes lined up on the counter, four of them hers.
“You took her kids,” she said. “All four.”
I promised Sheryl that in a room that smelled like plastic tubing, and I said NEVER, and I meant it.
Her husband died in March. She was gone by AUGUST.
Five months.
Barry and I signed in April at the county building in Ovid and went from two children to six in one afternoon.
Colleen was seven and slept on the floor by the crib for a year because nobody could tell her not to.
Rusty ate standing up for months, like the food might leave.
FOUR YEARS of school pictures and a minivan with a door that sticks.
It got good again.
Then this.
The woman never gave me her NAME.
She was about sixty, hair set, holding a paper grocery sack in both arms.
“I have been looking for you since the funeral,” she said.
I asked her what she wanted and she looked past me at the stairs.
She took a green metal lunch tin out of the sack, the kind kids carried in the seventies, with a hardware-store padlock through the clasp.
There was masking tape across the lid with my name on it in Sheryl’s handwriting.
My name.
“The name she gave you was borrowed,” she said. “The rest of it is in there.”
I asked her to say it again and she did, the same words, standing on my step in the cold.
“The key is taped under the bottom,” she said.
The screen door was open behind me and the hallway smelled like socks and syrup.
I said it out loud, to a stranger: I HAVE HER FOUR CHILDREN ASLEEP UPSTAIRS.
She nodded like she had already decided I would be the one to look.
I worked the key off with my thumbnail and put it in the lock while she watched.
The lid came up an inch, and I saw what was sitting on top, and I FORGOT HOW TO STAND UP.
The step, twenty to seven
The thing sitting on top was a driver’s license.
Michigan, the old kind, laminated, one corner curled from years in a wallet. Her face on it. Dark hair cut at the jaw and that flat look she gave any camera she couldn’t get away from.
The name printed next to it was Denise Ann Pruitt.
I sat down on my own step with the tin open across my knees and the cold coming up through my sweatpants.
Under the license there was paper. A lot of it, folded in thirds, held with a rubber band that had gone hard and split in two places.
I put the lid back down. I ran the padlock through the clasp without closing it and held the key in my fist until the teeth left marks in my palm.
“Sheryl Ann Kovach was my daughter,” the woman said. “She died when she was four years old.”
The washer hit its spin cycle and the porch boards under me started to shake, the way the whole downstairs does.
“Her name is Sheryl Dolan,” I said.
“Her name was Denise. She was my sister’s girl.”
A truck went past on the road with its blade up. Ordinary traffic, six-forty in the morning, the same three vehicles that always go by while I’m packing lunches.
I asked her how she found my house. She didn’t answer that one.
“Four years you’ve had them,” she said.
“You need to go.”
“That’s all right.” She folded the grocery sack flat against her chest and looked up at the window over the porch roof, the one that’s Colleen’s. “That isn’t the part you have to worry about.”
“Then what is.”
“Watch your mail Thursday.”
The county building in Ovid
The room they gave us in April had a window facing the parking lot and a radiator that came on and off like something breathing.
Barry pushed Sheryl in from the car in Dean’s flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled twice. She was down to a hundred and four pounds by then and she still put her lipstick on in the visor mirror on the way over, and got mad at me for taking the turn too fast.
The county woman was Loretta Doyle. Cardigan, reading glasses on a chain, a jar of stickers on the corner of her desk for kids who had to sit through the boring part. She gave Colleen the whole jar.
There is a line on the consent form that says print your full legal name.
Sheryl looked at that line for a while. Then she printed it in squared-off capitals, one letter at a time, pressing hard, and her hand shook the whole way through it.
I thought it was the medication. I sat two feet from her and I thought, that’s what the pills do to your hands, and I put my hand on her back.
Loretta notarized it. Barry signed. I signed. Colleen walked out under Loretta’s arm with a sticker on each cheek and we all went to the Big Boy.
Sheryl was my friend for eleven years and there are things about her I never asked one question about.
She didn’t drive. Not once. The bus, or me, for eleven years, to work and to the clinic and to the Meijer in St. Johns, and when I said get your license already she said she didn’t like being on anybody’s list, and I laughed because that sounded like her.
She didn’t get in pictures either. At every school picnic she was the one holding the camera. There are four hundred photographs of those kids in my house and their mother is in eleven of them, and in eight of the eleven she is turned partly away.
The tin lived on top of her refrigerator, up where the cereal boxes go. I asked her about it one time, standing in her kitchen with a casserole in my hands, and she said it was her mother’s recipes. Then she took it down and put it in the cupboard over the stove and shut the door, and asked me if I wanted coffee.
I drove her home from the county building that April afternoon, because she did not drive, and I never asked her why.
Faye
I called Loretta Doyle on Wednesday at the county and she remembered every one of us by name.
She said an adoption that has been final four years is about the most settled thing there is in this state. She said people call her twice a year with a cousin who wants to make trouble, and it never goes anywhere, and I should stop reading things at six in the morning on my porch.
I made spaghetti Wednesday night. Pete got sauce in his hair. Alan and Tina had a fight over the good chair. It was a completely normal evening and I sat in it like a person waiting for a phone to ring.
Thursday the mail came at ten past eleven and there was a certified letter and I signed for it standing in the driveway in Barry’s coat.
Faye Elaine Kovach. That was her name, in the caption, on the second line. Four years of a woman with no name and there she was, typed.
The petition asked the court to set aside the adoption of all four children on the grounds that the consent executed in April was signed in the name of a person deceased since 1994. It asked that Faye Elaine Kovach, great-aunt, be appointed guardian. Attached, it said, exhibit list: certified death certificate of Sheryl Ann Kovach, age four. Certified death certificate of Dean Robert Dolan. Statement of survivor benefits payable to the minor children of Dean Robert Dolan, monthly, one thousand eight hundred forty-seven dollars.
I read that last line in the driveway with the truck already gone up the block.
Barry came home at four and read it at the kitchen table with his boots still on, which he never does, and then he read it again.
“Burn the tin,” he said. “We say she was Sheryl and that’s the end of it.”
The fence by the bus stop
Friday morning I went to the school office instead of going to work.
The secretary there is a woman named Pam Doyle, no relation to Loretta, and she has known my kids since Alan was in kindergarten. I asked her whether anybody had ever asked for records on Colleen or Rusty.
She didn’t want to look. She looked.
Then she came around the counter with a photocopy and put it face down on the ledge first, which is how I knew.
A records request. Colleen Dolan and Russell Dolan. The box for the relationship of the requester had next of kin written in it in blue ballpoint. Signed F. Kovach, dated the ninth of October, six weeks before the woman ever stood on my step.
Pam said it was denied. She said the girl at the desk that day was a sub and she is very sorry, and she stood there with her hands together while I read it four times.
I went home and sat in the van in my own driveway with the heat running.
I thought about the funeral. There is a book at those places that people sign, and ours came home in a box of casserole dishes and lives on the shelf in the hall closet, and I went in and got it and went through it page by page at the kitchen table. Second to last line. F. Kovach, in the same blue hand.
She stood in the back of the room while I read out the thing I wrote about my friend, and then she drove home and started looking.
Colleen came in at three-fifty and dropped her bag by the door like always and started making herself the peanut butter thing she makes.
I asked her, as ordinary as I could get it out, whether a lady in a grey coat had ever talked to her.
She didn’t even stop spreading it.
“The coat lady,” Colleen said. “She was at the fence at the bus stop, like, twice. She gave Rusty a dollar and he spent it on a slushie and he was supposed to give me half.”
I said okay. I said that was okay.
“She wanted to know what my mom’s real name was,” Colleen said. “I told her Sheryl.”
Two thousand dollars, September the ninth
I waited until they were all down and Barry was on the couch with the TV on his face, and then I took the tin out of the cupboard over the stove and turned it out on the kitchen table.
Four birth certificates, one for each of them, mother’s name Sheryl Ann Kovach.
A marriage license, Dean Robert Dolan and Sheryl Ann Kovach, a courthouse in Owosso, the year Colleen was born.
A Social Security card so old the paper had gone the color of weak tea.
A photograph of two girls on a porch step in shorts, maybe nine and maybe four, the little one holding a plastic pail. I have seen my friend’s face every day for eleven years and I know which one she is.
And a page from a legal pad, folded in eighths, in that squared-off capital handwriting.
IF SHE EVER COMES, GIVE HER THE PAPER TAPED IN THE LID. NOTHING ELSE. YOU DO NOT OWE HER THE REST OF IT.
I turned the lid over.
Taped inside it, under a square of felt somebody had cut with pinking shears, there was half a sheet of lined paper.
Received of D. Pruitt two thousand dollars, for S.A.K. certificate and card. Paid in full. F. Kovach. Sept 9.
A receipt. In the blue ballpoint. In the same hand that signed my dead friend’s funeral book and my daughter’s school records.
Sheryl was nineteen that September. She was nineteen and she needed to be somebody else and her aunt sold her a dead four-year-old for two thousand dollars, cash, and wrote out a receipt for it, because a woman who takes money like that wants a piece of paper saying it was a sale and not a gift.
I sat there with it until my feet went cold on the linoleum.
Then I went in and shook Barry’s shoulder until he came up out of the couch.
“She didn’t steal it,” I said. “Faye sold it to her.”
Sunday, my kitchen table
Her lawyer’s certificate of service had her phone number on it, so I called it myself on Saturday morning and said Sunday at two, my house, and she said all right like I’d asked her to a card party.
Loretta Doyle came at one-thirty on her own time and sat at the end with her coat over the back of the chair. Barry took the kids to his brother’s.
Faye had the same coat on. She put her purse on the floor and her hands on the table and she talked for eleven minutes without much help from anybody.
She talked about her daughter, the real one, the fever and the hospital in Lansing and the plot in Owosso she still pays the mowing on. She talked about her sister, who was no good, and about Denise, who was no good either, and how she had prayed on this. She said blood is blood. She said she wasn’t trying to take anybody’s children, she just wanted it done properly, and Sunday afternoons, and to be at the Christmas program.
Then she said the checks.
She said the children are owed money from their father and that money should be handled by family, and she said family with her chin up, and I understood then that the coat and the set hair were the part she does before she gets to that sentence.
I put the half sheet of lined paper on the table and slid it across with two fingers.
She read it the way you read a menu you already know.
“That proves she paid me,” Faye said. “That doesn’t prove I knew what she was going to do with it.”
“You wrote out a receipt for a dead child’s Social Security card.”
“I had a funeral to pay for.”
Loretta took her glasses off and set them down and said what she had to say, which is that a false name on a consent is a thing the county has to be told about, whoever tells it, and that her own signature is the notary on that form, and she would be reporting herself Monday morning.
Faye picked her purse up off the floor at that. She had thought she was the only one holding a match.
I said I would be the one to call the county, Monday, before either of them.
She said I was a fool and that I’d lose all four.
We did not lose them. What we lost was nine thousand four hundred dollars to a lawyer in Lansing, on the equity line, two hundred fourteen a month for the next five years, and Barry’s Tuesday and Thursday nights at the plant to cover it. Faye’s lawyer withdrew in January, three days after ours mailed him a copy of the receipt in his client’s handwriting. The court corrected the record in March, and the corrected order has Denise Ann Pruitt typed on it where the other name used to be, and it is the first true page in that whole file.
I walked her out and she stopped on the step where she had stood with the sack.
“You could have burned it,” she said.
The storm door went out of my hand and banged twice before it caught.
The tin on top of our fridge
It’s April again and the minivan door still sticks, and you still have to lift the handle and put your hip into it.
Six lunchboxes on the counter Tuesday morning, four of them hers. The washer going. Same porch, same three vehicles up the road at twenty to seven.
I told Colleen in the van, parked outside the rink, with the engine off, because she is twelve now and she has a way of going quiet that means she has already worked most of a thing out. I told her all of it, her mother’s name and where the other name came from and what her great-aunt did for two thousand dollars. Rusty knows the short version. June and Pete know that their mom had two names, like a cat that lives at two houses, and that is all they need for a while.
Colleen took the masking tape off the lid herself, in the kitchen, with her thumbnail, the way I got the key off.
She wanted to know if we could put actual recipes in it. I said we could put whatever we wanted in it.
She tore a new strip of tape and printed DENISE on it in capitals, pressing hard, one letter at a time, and reached up and set the tin back on top of the refrigerator where it goes.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who is raising a child that came to them the hard way.
For more stories about life’s unexpected turns, you might like to read about how my father’s level was packed in a box with a coffee mug or the time I found my ex-wife in a hallway chair.
