“Derek arranged it,” I said. “We’ve done it for years.”
“Then call him.”
I picked up the phone again. Derek answered on the third ring. I told him to come to the café.
“Already on my way,” he said. “Do we need more chairs?”
“Ruth’s here.”
There was a pause, then he asked what I meant.
“She’s standing here. Come now.”
I ended the call before he could ask another question. Ruth had laid the empty frame on a table, keeping the photograph in her hand.
“Where did you go?” I asked. It came out sharper than I intended. “Your house was empty. You weren’t at school. Nobody told me anything.”
“My mother got a live-in job. We had to move quickly.”
“A job?”
“Yes. A job with somewhere for us to sleep.”
I rubbed at a sticky patch on the tabletop. Such an ordinary explanation. I had spent years imagining accidents and people who wouldn’t let her come home.
“Derek said nobody knew where you went.”
“Perhaps he didn’t then.”
“He’s said it ever since.”
Ruth pulled out the chair opposite me but didn’t sit.
“When we were nineteen, I found your search notice. I contacted your brother.”
I stopped rubbing the table.
“Mine? Derek?”
“Yes.”
“He would have told me.”
She looked at me for a moment. “That’s why I contacted him.”
I wanted to ask exactly what she meant by contacted. I wanted to suggest she had used the wrong details, reached someone else, remembered the year incorrectly. Instead I got up and shifted a chair that wasn’t blocking anything.
Derek came through the door carrying a packet of paper cups. He put them on the counter and looked from Ruth to the bare hook on the wall.
“Owen says you’re Ruth.”
“I am.”
“She remembers the cake,” I said. “The one I sat on.”
He gave me a quick, impatient look. “Let’s slow down.”
“She says she contacted you when we were nineteen.”
“No,” he said. “That didn’t happen.”
Ruth set the photograph flat on the table.
“Think before you answer,” she said.
“I don’t need to think. You’re mistaken.” He turned toward me. “People are coming tonight. We should go ahead until we’ve checked who she is properly.”
I looked at my brother, waiting for him to ask her about the cake, or school, or anything that might help him check. He reached past me instead and straightened the stack of flyers.
Ruth put her bag on the chair and took out a thin plastic folder. Derek kept his hand on the flyers.
“I kept a copy,” she said.
She drew out a photocopied letter and a smaller piece of paper. The copy had a dark stripe down one edge. She placed the smaller paper beside it, smoothing a curled corner with her thumb.
“The letter I sent you. Registered. And the receipt that came back.”
Derek looked down. His fingers stopped moving.
I leaned across the table, but Ruth kept the letter facing herself for a moment. There was something deliberate about it. She had brought these papers here, but she wasn’t handing us her bag to search through.
“May I read it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s been twenty years,” Derek said.
I looked up before she turned the page.
“A minute ago, you said it didn’t happen.”
“An envelope might have come. That doesn’t mean I remember what was in it.” He pulled out a chair, then pushed it back under the table without sitting. “We got things from people. You remember that.”
I did remember. Wrong names. School photographs with circles drawn around strangers. I had wanted every envelope to matter. Now he was asking me to put hers among the mistakes.
Ruth held the copy by its upper corners so I could read it. Her younger handwriting leaned to the right, the lines squeezed closer together near the bottom.
