“We find out everything.”
“Lenora Always Got Everything”
The trust still existed. Some money had been withdrawn legally for our care. Other transfers were far harder to explain. We hired an attorney. Then we confronted Maris one final time.
This time, there was no Irene to soften the room. No childhood fear. Just the three of us sitting around the same dining table where she had once told us how lucky we were to have her.
“Why?” I asked.
Maris stared at her hands. For a long time, she refused to answer. Then she said something I never expected. “Lenora always got everything.”
Corbin frowned. “What does that mean?”
“She was prettier. Mom worried about her more. People forgave her mistakes. Then she had you two and suddenly everyone acted like she was some saint because she was sick.”
I stared at her. “You did this because you were jealous?”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“It sounds exactly that simple.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I raised you.”
“You also spent twenty years making sure we believed our mother threw us away.”
“I fed you. I gave you a home.”
“And reminded us every day that we owed you for it.”
She began crying. For once, it didn’t make me feel guilty.
Before leaving, I placed one of Lenora’s letters on the table. “You could have let us love both of you.” Maris looked up. “You chose to make us hate a woman who wasn’t here to defend herself.”
What Money Turned Out to Be the Easy Part
Corbin and I did not see her again for a long time. The legal part took months. Some money from the trust was recovered. Some wasn’t. But money turned out to be the easiest loss to understand. The harder part was grieving a mother we had already spent twenty years believing didn’t love us.
Corbin kept one box of Lenora’s letters. I kept the other. On our birthday that year, we read the final letter together. Lenora had written it shortly before the accident. At the end, she wrote: Tell my boys I’m coming back. I know they’re too young to understand why Mommy had to leave for a little while, but someday I’ll explain everything.
She never got the chance. So twenty years later, we finally let her explain it through the pages she had left behind.
And for the first time in my life, when I thought about my biological mother, I didn’t picture a woman walking away from two unwanted little boys. I pictured a sick young mother sitting in a hospital bed, writing letters to the children she was fighting to come home to.
