The Letter That Arrived on a Tuesday

In 1987, a retired Sunday school teacher named Dorothy Caldwell lived alone in a small apartment in Terre Haute, Indiana. She had spent thirty-one years teaching fourth graders at First Community Church, and most days she wondered whether any of it had taken root. Then a letter arrived — handwritten, postmarked from Nairobi. A man named James Odhiambo wrote to tell her that he was the boy who sat in the third row of her class in 1974.…