The mail kept coming. Three weeks after the funeral, the mailbox filled itself every afternoon as though nothing had changed. Catalogs for garden tools, for compression socks, for coins. A dentist's office reminding Doris of her Tuesday cleaning. The electric bill, which Meg had already transferred to her own name but which arrived anyway, addressed to Doris Linden, in the small mechanical type of a system that did not yet know.
Meg drove to the house on Locust every day after work. She let herself in with the key that had always been under the stone frog by the side door. She sat at the kitchen table, where her mother had eaten breakfast for thirty-one years, and she sorted.
Three piles: discard, handle, keep. The keep pile was small. The handle pile was manageable. The discard pile filled a grocery bag each day.
On the fourth week a letter arrived with no return address. The envelope was cream-colored, square, with Doris's name in a careful handwriting that Meg did not recognize. Inside, a single card:
Dear Doris,
Thank you for the scarf. I wear it every day. The blue one — you know the one. Jean says hello too.
All my love,
Ruth
Meg turned it over. Nothing on the back. She looked at the envelope again: postmarked Corvallis, Oregon. Her mother had never, to Meg's knowledge, been to Oregon. Her mother had never mentioned a Ruth, or a Jean. Her mother did not, as far as Meg knew, knit.
She put the card on the kitchen table, apart from the three piles.
Over the following days the apart-pile grew. A key with a yellow tag that fit no lock in the house. A postcard of a lake — Mirror Lake, the caption said — with "miss this" written on the back in her mother's hand, addressed to no one, never sent. A renewal notice for a Portuguese-language magazine that Meg had not known her mother subscribed to and that her mother, as far as Meg knew, could not read.
She found, in the desk drawer she had not yet opened, three more postcards from Ruth. They spanned eleven years. The most recent said: The dahlias came back. Yours never will and I'm sorry. But the roses might. Give them one more year.
Meg did not know what dahlias her mother had lost, or what roses might still be waiting. She looked out the kitchen window at the garden, which she had not touched. It was November. Everything that was going to die had already died.
She called her brother in Phoenix.
"Did Mom know anyone named Ruth? In Oregon?"
"I don't think so."
"Did she knit?"
"She crocheted. When we were little."
"Did she grow dahlias?"
A long pause. "The back garden. There used to be dahlias by the fence, when we were in high school. They died one winter and she was — I don't know. She was upset about it. I remember her being upset."
"How upset?"
"I was sixteen, Meg. I don't remember. Why?"
"There's a card. From someone named Ruth."
"Who's Ruth?"
"I'm asking you."
He didn't know. Neither did Aunt Carol. Neither did Faye, who had been Doris's closest friend for twenty years, who came over on Saturday and read the card and said, "Huh," and turned it over, and said "Huh" again.
Meg wrote back. She found the Corvallis address through the postcard postmarks. She wrote:
Dear Ruth,
My name is Meg Linden. I'm Doris's daughter. My mother passed away on October 11th. I'm sorting her mail. I found your card about the scarf.
I don't know who you are. I'd like to.
—Meg
She mailed it and went back to sorting. The discard pile. The handle pile. The keep pile. The apart-pile, which had no name and which she could not bring herself to sort into the other three.
Three weeks later, a letter came from Corvallis.
Dear Meg,
I'm sorry. I didn't know. Your mother and I wrote to each other for twelve years. We met at a conference for — well. We met at a conference. She sat next to me and we talked for four hours and neither of us heard the keynote. After that we wrote.
The scarf: she mailed it last Christmas. It's blue wool, hand-dyed, very soft. She said she'd learned to knit specifically to make it. I believe that. It's slightly uneven in a way that suggests someone who was learning as they went.
Jean is my wife.
Your mother was very private. She said you were good and that she was proud of you and that you had your father's hands.
I'm so sorry, Meg.
Ruth
Meg set the letter on the kitchen table. She sat for a long time. The house was quiet the way her mother's house had always been quiet — not empty, just still, full of things that did not need to speak.
She had her father's hands. Her mother had never told her that.
She went to the closet in the hallway and opened the box she'd packed from the bedroom. Under the winter coats, behind the hatboxes: a knitting bag she had not recognized as a knitting bag. Inside it, blue wool, two needles, and a practice piece about six inches long, ribbed, with the kind of errors that come from counting carefully and still losing track.
She held it for a while. Then she put it in the keep pile.