counties in the country, so after that I began to imagine my birth family living in their mansion in their fancy Philadelphia suburb and belonging to a country club. I could just see my grandparents playing golf during the summer and bridge during the winter.
I did a lot of research, scouring the library at my high school for information about Pennsylvania, trying to replace the fictions in my head with facts. I even studied the style of the quilt I had been wrapped in when I was first handed over to my parents. It was a simple block pattern of burgundy, green, and blue squares on a black background. One book said the design was often used by the Amish, whose quilts sold for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. I figured my grandmother had purchased it at an expensive handicraft boutique in the city. Either that, or she had gotten it straight from Amish country herself, which didn’t look all that far from Philadelphia and was probably a common day trip for a woman of means and leisure.
I imagined my birth mother as eighteen or nineteen when I was born. Pregnant by accident. Old enough to love me but not to keep me. I imagined my grandmother to be between Mama and Dad in age—forty-four and fifty at the time—when she handed me to them, young enough to keep me but benevolent enough to give me to a childless couple. Though she might have been familiar with Plain people in general, because she lived in Pennsylvania and had purchased the quilt, I felt sure she had been a little alarmed by their age and dress. Already, Dad would have had white hair and must have had his black hat with him. And Mama would have worn her Mennonite cap, rubber-soled shoes, and a Plain caped dress.
Dad spoke slowly, something I found especially annoying back then in my teenage years. “Your birth grandmother didn’t think there was anything odd about Mama’s head covering,” he said. He was shelling hazelnuts at the kitchen table. He looked at me with his kind blue eyes. “She knew we were Mennonite, Alexandra. We’re whom she wanted for you—whom God wanted.”
The tone in his voice hadn’t been harsh, but it had been firm. And final. I was afraid I’d hurt his feelings.
Now Dad coughed. I offered him more water, but he shook his head, his eyes barely open. With each breath the rattle in his chest grew more pronounced, and after a while he closed his eyes and I thought he’d drifted off to sleep, but then he said, “Always remember how much Mama and I love you too.”
“I will,” I whispered.
“When your grandmother gave you to us, she handed over a box as well. A carved box.”
A box had never been part of the story. I sat on the edge of the bed, and he relaxed his grip on my hand and turned his face toward me.
“Why didn’t I know about this?”
“It wasn’t something to give a small child, not like the quilt, so we put it away until you were older. Time passed, and then your mother…” His voice trailed off.
Then my mother died, and either he forgot or he chose not to tell me. I held my breath as I waited for him to continue.
“What can I say but forgive me? She would have told you about the box years ago.”
“Where is it now?”
“In my closet.”
I glanced toward the closed wooden doors.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Some old papers.” He coughed again. “That sort of thing. Nothing of too much importance, as far as we could ever tell.”
He coughed some more, stirring the rattle from deep in his chest.
“I’ll look at the box later.” I squeezed my father’s hand.
“The key is on the bureau.” He placed his free hand flat over his chest, over the double wedding ring quilt my mother made their first year of marriage.
“The key?”
“To the box. It’s in my coin dish.”
I remembered coming across a key when I chose coins for my Sunday offerings as a child.
“Don’t forget,” he said.
“I won’t.” I let go of his hand and picked up his Bible again. Under any other circumstances, especially with Dad’s blessing, I would have been tearing the closet apart as I searched for the box, but at the moment I couldn’t bear to leave his side, not even for that.
I continued to read, even though he fell back to sleep by the time I finished Psalm 24. When Sophie