The Bluebird Card
The first thing my husband’s grandmother did when she walked into our falling-down house was put her hand flat on the kitchen doorframe.Get Marriage Tips
She didn’t look at the peeling wallpaper. She didn’t look at the hole in the ceiling where Nate had pulled out the old knob-and-tube wiring. She didn’t look at the bucket in the corner catching drips from the roof.
She looked at the doorframe.
Under four layers of paint, if you squinted, you could see little pencil lines. Dozens of them, climbing up the wood. Some had letters next to them, too faint to read.
Opal ran her thumb over one of the lowest marks. Her hand was shaking.
“My mother measured me here,” she said. “Every birthday. Until I was fourteen.”
I stood very still in the middle of the kitchen with my car keys in my hand.
“Opal,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d ever been here.”
“I was born in the back bedroom, Callie. In 1938. In the middle of a blizzard. The doctor couldn’t get through, so a neighbor woman did it.” She turned around and looked at me with her sharp blue eyes. “My name was Opal Miller before it was Opal Brenner. This was my family’s house.”Plan Family Trips
Then she reached into her purse and took out a folded piece of paper.
“And that’s not the only reason I asked you to bring me here,” she said. “I need your help. And I need you to keep it from Ronald.”
She handed me the paper.
It was a collection letter. For a hospital bill. From the hospital where I work.
“I’ve never once in my life been sent to collections,” Opal said. “Not in eighty-eight years. And I have money. Or I did.”
She lowered herself carefully into the one good chair we owned.
“I think my son has been stealing from me,” she said. “And I think the twenty thousand dollars he gave your brothers and sisters-in-law at Easter was mine.”
To understand how we got there, I have to go back two years. To another Easter.