She reached across the table and touched my birthmark the way other mothers touch a forehead to check for fever.
“Your father had a mark just like this one,” she said. “On the back of his neck. He called it his lucky stamp.”
Cooper Talbot d*ed in August of 2009, when I was fourteen months old.
All I had of him was a rusty coffee tin on the closet shelf.
Inside were a flat carpenter’s pencil, a tape measure, and a photograph of a man laughing on a roof.
My mother never talked about him much.
It hurt too much.
The only other person who ever mentioned him was Mr. Griffin Ziegler, the lawyer who gave his eulogy.
Every Christmas, Mr. Ziegler dropped an envelope with two hundred dollars in my mother’s mailbox.
“For the girl,” the card always said.
Everyone in Oakdale loved Mr. Ziegler.
He paid for the new scoreboard at the football field.
