…”I’m his mother.”
I read it standing in my dad’s closet. Then I sat down on the floor and read every letter, all thirty-one of them, in order.
In 1983, my dad had an affair with a woman named Linda. She was twenty-two. She got pregnant. My parents had been trying for a baby for six years and couldn’t. So the three of them made an arrangement that I can still barely wrap my head around. My mom would raise the baby as her own. Linda would stay away. Nobody would ever tell me.
Linda kept her word for forty years. She wrote to my dad for a while, then stopped. Then my dad got sick, and she found out, and she couldn’t stay away anymore. Every Wednesday at noon, while my mom was at church. Butterscotch candies, because they’d been his favorite when he was young.
“Don’t let Linda in” wasn’t a warning about a stranger. It was my dad, deep in his illness, still trying to keep a promise he made forty years ago.
I didn’t sleep. The next morning, I drove to my parents’ house and asked my mom to sit with me at the kitchen table. I put the shoebox between us.
She looked at it for a long time. She didn’t cry. She just put her hand flat on the lid and said, “I always wondered if she’d come back.”
Then she told me everything. How scared she’d been that I would love Linda more. How she’d decided, the first night she held me, that I was hers and nothing else mattered. “I didn’t choose how you came to us,” she said. “But I chose you every single day after that.”
I met Linda the next Wednesday, in my parents’ driveway. She was shaking. She said she’d understand if I never wanted to see her again.
The Wednesday after that, my mom stayed home from church. She set the table for four. Linda brought the butterscotch candies. My dad looked around the table, confused but smiling, and said, “Everybody’s here.” For once, he was exactly right.
