Writing for two

My mother's cast came off on Tuesday. She has a brace now, and a list of exercises with a rubber ball, and a wrist that does about half of what she tells it to. She can't hold a pen for more than a word or two. So for the last month I've been writing her letters for her.

She calls on Sunday afternoons with the letters she owes, and I sit at my kitchen table with a pad, and she dictates. Her correspondence is larger than I knew. A librarian she worked with in the eighties who retired to Arizona. A cousin of my father's in Wisconsin. Two former students, now grown, now with children, who still write to her at Christmas and on her birthday. A woman from church who moved to her daughter's in Rochester and is lonely. My mother answers every one, and she was not going to let a wrist interfere with that, so she has drafted me.

She dictates the punctuation. I'd forgotten she does that. "Comma. New paragraph. No, a period, she'll think I'm rushing her." She spells any name she thinks I might get wrong, including ones I've known all my life. And she does not want my help with the sentences. Several times I've offered a better word, out of habit, and she's said "No," and then, after a pause, "Read it back," and then, "No." Once I suggested cutting a sentence that said the same thing as the one before it. She said that was the sentence that mattered, and that the person reading it would know why. I left it in. I don't know why, and I suspect I'm not meant to.

I write in other people's voices for a living. I've written old soldiers and children and a queen. I thought I knew my mother's voice better than any of them. I knew how she talks to me. It turns out she talks to a lonely woman in Rochester quite differently: more slowly, and more gently, and with more jokes. I didn't know she was that funny with other people. I'm a little jealous, honestly.

At the bottom of each letter, she has me add a line in brackets: "Written by my daughter, who has my permission but not my handwriting." Then I mail them from Seattle, which must be very confusing for the post office and for the woman in Rochester.

The brace comes off in a few weeks. I'll miss Sundays like this more than I'll admit to her.

Have you ever written something in someone else's words, and learned who they were from it?