There is an office in Tallahassee on Winewood Road, full of beggars letters. This is where we write, abandoned children, for non-identifying information about our adoptions. For an extra thirty five dollars you can register to be reunited with your kin. If they pay, and if you pay, and if dates and names on records are truthful when many are not, you might receive a letter. Like this strange letter that came to me, on unsentimental paper, no greeting and unsigned, smelling of cloves and the ether of an unfamiliar home. From my mother.

"My mother killed my father with a shoe. I saw my mother use the heel of my father’s shoe as a hammer, and afterwards I couldn’t see him wear them without knowing that with every step they were hammering him into the earth, and one day he would disappear beneath the dirt. It happened. They might not have done it if my mother hadn’t shown them how.

She would have killed me too if I hadn’t left home when I did. I cite as evidence the fact that at twelve I was five foot seven, and when I left home at eighteen, I was five foot five. Pounded down two inches in six years. There is more. When I was thirteen, I wanted to be someone else so badly that one morning I woke up and none of my shoes fit, but nothing else had changed. Only my feet were someone else. My mother bought me new shoes with heavy beechwood heels. I never trusted them and walked on my toes for years, and still I lost those two inches. I hope your mother made you tall.

About your father. A man at work wore dad shoes. Heavy brown oxfords with waxed laces. Every day there was cake in the break room, because everyone has been born once. We can agree on that, if nothing else. I saw that on his piece of cake was half a blue flower. It mirrored my half. I was about to comment on this when he used his plastic spoon to scrape the flower off his cake. I think, work is work and cake is cake and you can accomplish both without pleasure if you put your mind to it. Even so, the circumstance of the flower was enough for me. He is married, and knows nothing of you.

I have no sisters or brothers. No children. A woman who sees hammers in shoes is not a mother. When you were born I didn’t see your face. I made sure you never saw mine. Because it’s an old wives tale here that a child who has never seen her mother’s face can cure warts. It’s a small thing. But I wanted that for you."

I let the letter sit a while. Before I write back. Then I send this.

"They brought me home in a hurricane, my new mama and daddy. They named me Lucille Kaye and called me Lucky. And that has been mostly true. I am not tall, but I have never been pounded. Because of the hurricane, all the milk had soured, so they gave me to my grandmother’s Collie to suckle amongst her wriggling pups. My bald head disturbed her so that she licked whorls into my scalp and the hair that grew from them coiled up like bed springs. On my baptismal day, the holy water sprang away from my head, splashing the priest so that I was only partially baptized. What percentage was completed we have never determined.

To retrain my hair, daily Mama smeared warm baby oil on my head and covered that with a towel wrapped into a turban. Brazened by my exotic headwrap, I started a business on the raised wooden stand that held our trash cans. I coaxed legs and eyes from tadpoles, who grew into frogs but kept their tails, and I gave one away free with every paid wart removal. One day someone set fire to the trash can stand. Frightened, Mama wound my hair onto tight rods and applied a stinging poison that turned my bewitched coils into soft ringlets, and the danger passed.

During spring break in Panama City, I saw a black-eyed boy with one black eye riding shotgun in a pickup truck. I fixed his eye with the back of my cold thumb, and made him mine by dropping three eyelashes down the back of his shirt so that he itched for me something terrible. I scratched. His name is Nico. I have identical twin daughters, born three years apart. They were born brand new, and were instantly antiqued by the oil of many hands, made dark with history from the old country. They are Gemma and Lucia."

For a while we write, outlandish lies disguised as family legend, fireside tales in place of familial warmth, evasive nonsense as inherited wisdom. With just enough truth sprinkled throughout to keep our eyes moving forward across the glib words, tripping occasionally on unexpected bits of honesty and going back to read those again.

On the eve of another hurricane, Nico and I ready the house as best we can, pack up the girls and our dog, Griselda, and head for Disneyworld. In this game of coastal roulette we know our home will stand or fall with or without our presence, and we know how quickly the enchantment of flashlights dims as unconditioned heat builds and background silence stretches on. And, anyway, riding out a storm in Disneyworld is better than riding it out in cheap motel in Opp, Alabama.

Four days later, a neighbor calls to tell us the power was out for three days but is back on now. That the storm yanked up two of our river birch trees, and tossed a weedy pine tree onto our back fence, and we will have plenty of yard work ahead of us. Of course, with the power out for those days, the refrigerator will need to be dumped and scoured. We head home.

We pull into our driveway, bouncing and crunching over fallen branches and pine cones, and we mourn our pretty birch trees with their curling bark and tender branches, and mourn even the awkward pine that has died too young. We unload the girls and Griselda and tuck them in front of the TV with a movie and popcorn that Griselda promises to divide among them equally. Nico pulls on rubber boots and goes to borrow a chain saw from a neighbor. I pull on rubber gloves and go to work on the fridge, my heart aching at the ruined food. Hours later, I am exhausted when I pull off the rubber gloves and wash my hands in the sink. I notice for the first time what appears to be a bump, a wart, on the first joint of my left hand pinky. I am stricken. Almost driven to my knees in front of the sink, as if hammered from overhead. Because I know. Somewhere, maybe in the Magic Kingdom amidst the thousands of milling tourists, I have seen my mother’s face, and passed her without knowing.

Somehow, she knows it too, because we never write again.