She lowered herself into the sturdy wooden chair and inhaled the chilly air into her nostrils as her arm rested on a stack of pages next to the typewriter. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to look at the stack just yet, so she let her eyelids close as she listened to the clattering of a trash can being dragged out into the alley by one of their neighbors. Just rip it off, like a Band-Aid, she told herself, and then turned her attention to the pile.

Dear Sirs,

Can you please confirm if Edward Dalton was a student at the College of Wooster between the years . . .

Dear Sirs,

I would like to know if you could tell me if Edward Dalton enlisted in the Army on . . .

They were all like that. Page after page of earnest pleas for information. Letter after letter typed to various civic and governmental agencies, inquiring about everything from her father’s educational enrollment to his military service to his work history. The letters looked like first drafts, with many words run through with x’s. Charlotte peeled back page after page of the letters with her father’s name somewhere in the body, and her mother’s name in signature at the bottom. She shook her head and wondered if her mother had gone crazy.

In a separate, much smaller pile, behind the large pile, she found several pages of her mother’s poetry. They were simple little poems, about flowers and butterflies and that kind of thing. These, Charlotte had already known about. Her mother had even submitted them for publication in The Daily Record’s Spindrift column. Some had been accepted and printed. Like the one on top of the pile:

Blue Monday

I wish I were a weather vane

Then I could vanish this quandry

Of brilliant sunshine versus rain

And know when to do my laundry!

Charlotte coughed out a guffaw, then dropped the clipping and slapped both palms to her forehead. She slid her palms down over her eyes and then down her cheeks, pulling the skin into a horror face the way she used to when she tried to make her little cousins laugh. Oh, God. So embarrassing. But there was a part of Charlotte that was a little proud. Mother had even thought to use the word “laundry” instead of “the warsh.” She smiled to herself.

She picked up the clipping again, holding it with fingers and thumbs in front of her face as she propped her elbows on the little table. The editors at the Spindrift committee weren’t exactly working overtime. “Quandary” was misspelled. She wondered if her mother had looked up the word in her dictionary. “Quandary” didn’t seem like a word her mother would have used. For someone who claimed to hate books, her mother spent a lot of time on something some might consider literary. That was sort of a quandary.

If her mother had submitted a poem and The Daily Record published it, she’d go swanning around the house humming to herself and smiling at things that normally didn’t warrant smiling. Like the sepia photograph of Grampy and Grammy Kurtz in front of the fence at their farm; an even more somber version of American Gothic.