My seven-year-old has drawn one house close to forty times since March, and when I finally asked where she’d seen it, she kept coloring and said, “I didn’t see it, Mom. I remember it.” So I put one in front of my father, and the look on his face is why we spent a Saturday hunting for it.
The pile by the fridge had gotten thicker than her spelling folder.
I’d quit saying anything in April, because kids her age loop, and I figured it was horses again.
But one night I laid six side by side, and nothing moved from page to page.
A narrow yellow house with one round window up under the roof.
A dead pine leaning off the right corner, bent toward the porch.
And a green door, colored so hard the crayon had gone shiny.
ALWAYS the green door.
That word she used, REMEMBER, followed me around the duplex for a week.
The farthest she’s been is my aunt’s brick ranch, with the carport and the goat nobody claims.
Thursday I set one beside Dad’s bowl of reheated chili without explaining.
He put the spoon down and didn’t pick it back up.
“Why do I know this?” he said.
“Know what, Dad? It’s a crayon house.”
He didn’t answer, but Saturday at seven his truck was idling in my driveway with Zofia’s booster strapped in.
We crawled county roads past Elkton, the drawing flat on my knee.
Four hours of nothing.
Then he turned onto gravel with grass up the middle, and never checked the map.
There it sat.
Narrow, yellow, one round window, the dead pine, and a door so green it hurt.
It was EVERY LINE OF HER DRAWING, right down to the bend in that tree.
Zofia unbuckled and pushed herself up between our seats.
“That’s the one,” she said, and pointed past my ear.
Nobody said anything.
“Stay in the truck with me, Zo,” Dad said, and he didn’t reach for his own door either.
So I walked up alone, past the pine, onto a porch that gave under my sneakers.
I lifted my fist to that green door and knocked twice.⬇️⬇️⬇️
Two knocks on a Saturday
The door opened before my hand came down from the second one.
A woman in her sixties, gray hair cut short, a dish towel over one shoulder. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked at me for maybe two seconds and then past me, at the truck.
“Shauna,” she said.
I have one picture of my mother. It’s a Polaroid from 1997, her laughing at a picnic table with a gap between her front teeth you could slide a dime through. It lived in my jewelry box until I was twelve and in a kitchen drawer after that.
The woman in the doorway had the gap.
She didn’t step out onto the porch. She kept one hand on the edge of the door and her eyes on the truck, where Zofia had her whole face pressed to the side window.
“It’s Saturday,” she said. “He brings her Wednesdays.”
I stood there with my fist still half closed.
Out in the gravel the engine was running. Dad had both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like we were still on the road and he had somewhere to be.
“He told me you didn’t want to be found,” I said.
She took the towel off her shoulder and folded it in half, and in half again, and held it against her stomach.
“Every Wednesday since the middle of March,” she said. “She has her own cup.”
The note on the toaster
My mother left on a Tuesday in October of 1999. I was nine.
I don’t remember her going. I remember the toaster. There was an envelope leaned up against it with MARTIN on the front in her slanty handwriting, and Dad read whatever was inside standing at the counter in his socks. Then he folded it into his shirt pocket and made me a grilled cheese for breakfast, because he didn’t know what else was in the house.
“Your mother went where she wanted to go,” he said.
That was the whole explanation. When I was fourteen I asked again, louder, and he said, “She doesn’t want to be found, Shauna. I’m not going to go dig her up.” I never asked a third time.
And he stayed. That’s the part everybody in Elkton would tell you first. He came to every band concert and sat in the second row in his work jacket. He taught me to drive in the Kroger lot on Sundays. He never said one bad word about her, which at the time I took for kindness.
He wrote my name on my lunch sack every school day for nine years, in black marker, in block capitals. SHAUNA. Like he was labeling a box for the movers. He still writes like that. Every container of chili in his freezer has a strip of masking tape across the lid that says CHILI and the date, and you could pick his R’s out of a lineup. The top of the R kicks out past the leg, like it’s trying to step off the line.
In March my shifts moved and I lost my Wednesdays. Dad said he’d take Zofia, no problem, he had nothing but time. I bought a booster seat at Walmart for thirty-four dollars and went to put it in his truck, and he’d already cleared the junk off the back of the bench for it.
“It can stay in,” he said. “I’m not going to keep taking it out.”
The Wednesdays she came home with a new box of crayons, the big one with the sharpener in the back. Dad said they’d stopped at the Dollar General. I said thank you. I didn’t think about it again.
Now the woman on the porch had her hand on the door, and she was waiting on me.
“Is he going to sit out there?” she said.
I turned around and walked back down the steps to the truck.
The booster seat
Dad rolled his window down about halfway. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the dead pine.
“Dad.”
“I know,” he said.
Zofia was on her knees in the booster with the belt off, holding the back of the bench. “Can I go in now? She’s got my cup. It’s the yellow one.”
“Sit down a second, Zo.”
I put my hands on the edge of his window. The glass was warm from the sun coming through the windshield all morning.
“She wrote me in February,” Dad said, still to the tree. “First time in twenty-six years. She’d heard from somebody at the church that you had a little girl, and she wanted to see her one time. That’s all she asked. One time.”
“So you brought her.”
“I brought her once.”
“Since March,” I said.
“It got to be more than once.”
I leaned in so I could see the back seat. “Zo. Is this where you go with Grandpa on Wednesdays?”
She nodded. She looked at Dad and then at me, checking whether she was in trouble, which is a look she’s had since she was two.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Grandpa said I don’t ever have to tell where we go,” she said. “I just get to remember it.”
I straightened up and stood in the gravel with my hands on my hips. Forty drawings. The pile by the fridge. I didn’t see it, Mom. I remember it. She hadn’t been confused. She’d been keeping her word to him the only way a seven-year-old can, by saying the true thing sideways and coloring the rest.
“We’re going home,” I said. “Start the truck. Turn it around.”
Dad put his hand on the gearshift and left it there.
And Zofia had the back passenger door open before either of us moved. She was out and across the yard in her purple sneakers, past the pine, up the two concrete steps, and the woman on the porch put a hand on her head as she went by like she’d done it a hundred times.
The green door swung shut behind my daughter.
An hour and forty
The kitchen was small and clean and smelled like coffee and Pine-Sol. A wind chime made out of bent spoons hung over the sink, which I don’t know why I remember.
The yellow plastic cup sat in the dish drainer. Somebody had painted a Z on it in red nail polish.
The fridge was covered. Zofia’s drawings, held up with magnets from a Ford dealership. Dad’s truck, with a square for the booster. The duplex, with our blue recycling bin. A woman with a gap in her teeth. One of me, I could tell by the ponytail and the phone.
On the table sat the big box of crayons with the sharpener in the back. The green one was worn down to a nub you could barely hold.
Zofia was already at the table with a sheet of paper, working on a horse.
“Coffee?” my mother said.
“No.”
She poured two anyway and set one in front of me.
“How far is this from Dad’s?” I said.
She tipped her head. “From Martin’s? Hour and forty. Less if the train’s not sitting across 9.”
“We left at seven.”
She looked at the clock on the stove. It said a quarter to twelve.
“Then he drove you around,” she said.
I turned the cup a little on the table. Four hours of county roads and feed stores and churches with their signs out front, the drawing flat on my knee, and him not saying a word, and him knowing the whole time. He’d been deciding. All morning he’d been deciding, and I’d been in the seat next to him thinking we were lost.
“He said you didn’t want to be found,” I said again. It was the only sentence I had.
“I left him,” she said. “I didn’t leave you. I’d have taken you if I’d had anywhere to take you to. I had a room over a laundromat in Carthage with a hot plate.”
“You could’ve called.”
“I called.”
“You could’ve written.”
She didn’t answer that right away. She looked at Zofia, who was coloring the horse’s mane purple and not listening, or acting like she wasn’t.
“I told your father I wouldn’t say anything to you about him,” she said. “I made him a promise in March. I’m not saying anything.”
Then she got up and went down the hall.
I heard a closet door and something being moved off a shelf, a vacuum cleaner or a box of Christmas stuff, and a long time went by. Zofia hummed. The spoon chime moved a little in the air from the vent.
She came back with a man’s boot box held shut by two rubber bands.
RETURN TO SENDER
She set the box on the table between the two coffees and pushed it toward me with two fingers, and sat back down.
I took the rubber bands off.
Envelopes. Stacked on edge, packed so tight the lid had bowed. Pink ones and white ones and the square kind that birthday cards come in. Every one of them addressed to Miss Shauna Bauer at the house on the hill where I grew up, in that same slanty hand from the envelope on the toaster.
None of them had been opened.
I pulled the first one out. December 1999. A Christmas card, by the shape.
Across the front, over my name, in black marker:
RETURN TO SENDER. NOT AT THIS ADDRESS.
Block capitals.
The R’s kicked out past the leg.
I pulled another one. March 2000. Same words, same marker. Another. My birthday, 2001, my eleventh. Same. I kept going and they kept saying it, year after year, NOT AT THIS ADDRESS, to the address I was standing in the kitchen of every single one of those days, eating cereal, doing homework at the table, two rooms away from whatever drawer he kept that marker in.
The last one was from October 2004. I was fourteen. That was the year I asked him the second time.
I opened the 2001 birthday card with my thumbnail. A horse on the front, a brown one in a field. Inside there was a five-dollar bill, gone soft, and four lines in her handwriting.
Happy 11th to my girl. I hope you still love horses. I asked your dad if you could call me on Sundays. My number is the same as the last card. I love you to the moon and I’m not going anywhere.
I put it down on the table, and the five fell out onto the floor, and neither of us picked it up.
“Sixty-one,” my mother said. “I counted them once. Then I quit counting and quit sending, because I figured he’d tell you they came, and you’d decided.”
Zofia looked up from her horse. “Mom, that’s a horse card.”
“It is, baby.”
My mother put her hand flat on the lid of the box.
“He said he’d tell you himself,” she said. “That was the deal.”
The bench seat
I carried the box out with both arms the way you’d carry a sleeping kid.
Dad hadn’t moved. The engine was off now. I went around to the driver’s side and opened his door, and I set the box down on the bench seat next to his leg, and I took the top off.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he started talking, and once he started he didn’t stop.
“She left you a note on a toaster. A toaster, Shauna. You know what I did that whole next year? I learned how to do a French braid off a library book. I sat in the truck outside that school every day at three because you wouldn’t get on the bus, you thought if you got on the bus somebody else would leave. You remember that? You don’t remember that. You were nine.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And here she comes in December with a Christmas card. Like it was nothing. Like you were a lake house she could come up to on the weekends when she felt like it. I wasn’t having you sit at that front window every Friday waiting on a car that’d show up when it suited her. I wasn’t having it. So yes, I sent them back. Every one. You want me to say I’m sorry about that, I’m not. I’d do it again for that nine-year-old.”
“Sixty-one,” I said.
“I didn’t count them.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“Then February. A letter in my mailbox. And I’m seventy-one years old, and I’m thinking about that nine-year-old, and I’m thinking about the one in the back seat who’s got one grandparent left that she knows of. So I drove up here. I sat at that table. And we came to an arrangement.”
“What arrangement.”
“Wednesdays,” he said. “She gets Zo on Wednesdays. And she doesn’t write you, doesn’t call you, doesn’t come to the duplex, doesn’t say one word to you about any of this. She agreed. She agreed to it in about two seconds, if you want to know. She wanted that little girl more than she wanted to be right about me.”
Behind me on the porch I heard the screen door. I didn’t turn around.
“And Thursday,” I said. “With the chili.”
“I said the first damn thing that came into my mouth.” He shook his head. “You put that thing down by my bowl, and it was the house, plain as a photograph. I thought, she knows. She’s testing me. And then I could see you didn’t, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands.”
“So you drove me around for four hours.”
“I was deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
He didn’t answer that.
“When were you going to tell me, Dad?”
He looked at the box and not at me.
“I wrote it all out,” he said. “Four pages. It’s in the lockbox at Elkton Savings, in with the title to this truck and the deed on the house. You’d have gotten it.”
I held on to the top of the open door.
“After you died,” I said.
“After. Yeah.” He nodded at the dashboard. “I figured by then she’d know Zo, and Zo’d know her, and it’d all be done, and you could be as mad at me as you wanted. I just wouldn’t have to be there for it.”
I looked at him for a while. He’s got a cowlick on the back of his head that he’s had since I was born, and it was sticking straight up from the headrest.
Then I opened the back door, reached across the bench, and unbuckled the booster seat.
“What are you doing,” Dad said.
I worked the strap loose from the anchor. The buckle stuck the way it always sticks. I pulled the seat out and stood there in the gravel holding it against my hip.
“Shauna. How are you getting home? That’s an hour and forty.”
“I know how far it is,” I said.
I carried the booster up the yard, past the pine, up the two steps onto the porch that gave under my sneakers, and I set it down next to the green door. My mother was in the doorway with the dish towel again. She looked at the seat, and at me, and out at the truck.
“Can you drive us home tonight?” I said.
“I can,” she said. “Where’s he going?”
Out in the gravel, the truck started.
The second Wednesday in November
I drive her myself now.
I gave back my Wednesdays at work. That’s eleven hours a week I don’t get paid for, and it shows up where you’d think it would, in the grocery cart and on the electric bill. My aunt offered to take Zofia on Wednesdays instead, with the goat, and I said thank you, no.
Dad hasn’t called. On the first Thursday, at six, I sat in my car outside his place with the engine running for about ten minutes and then I drove home. There’s still one of his containers in my freezer from before. CHILI and the date, on the masking tape, with the R kicking out past the leg. I haven’t eaten it and I haven’t thrown it out.
The pile by the fridge quit growing after that Saturday. She drew the house one more time, the next week, and that’s the one on top now. Narrow, yellow, one round window, the pine. The green door’s colored in regular this time, not hard. There are two people on the porch and a booster seat beside the door, and down in the gravel at the bottom of the page there’s a little brown truck with nobody in it yet.
I didn’t ask her about the truck.
It’s an hour and forty, the way I go, and less if the train’s not across 9. We crawl the last part of the gravel road with the grass going up the middle. Zofia has her shoes on before I’ve got it in park.
She’s up the steps before I’m out of the car. She lifts her fist to the green door and knocks twice, and it opens before she’s done with the second one.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s still waiting on a letter, or still sitting on one.
For more family secrets and unsettling patterns, read the husband who drove to Erie every second Thursday for eighteen years and the van that stopped at houses nobody visited. And when an old house becomes the center of a mystery, there’s the developers’ fight for a grandmother’s home.
