I wrote my granddaughter forty-one letters and never got one back. Last month she turned eighteen, and her mother had stopped my calls years ago. I kept writing anyway—birthdays, first days of school, the day her grandfather died—and sent them all to the only address I had. She wrote back in July, and her first line was that she’d counted them. Her number matched mine exactly. She had every single letter.
She said they’d been given to her a week after she turned eighteen, in a box, by a woman she’d never met. I asked who the woman was, and when she told me the name, I had to sit down. It was my daughter-in-law’s mother, a woman I’d only met twice and who had died three years ago. My granddaughter said the woman had left instructions that the box was not to be opened until she was eighteen. She also told her that if she ever wanted to know why I stopped coming around, she should read the letters first.
I asked what she’d thought of them, and she said some of them made her angry because they contradicted everything she’d been told about me. According to her mother, I’d walked away from the family and never tried to contact her again. My granddaughter said she believed that until she saw the postmarks on the envelopes. Every letter had been mailed from my address, every year, without a single break. Then she told me there was something else in the box that wasn’t from me. It was a photocopy of a letter her mother had written to her grandmother in 2018.
The letter said my daughter-in-law had been intercepting my mail and hiding it because she didn’t want her daughter knowing I was still trying to reach her. But the final paragraph was what made my granddaughter call me immediately. Her mother had written that she’d only planned to keep the letters until her daughter was old enough to understand what really happened. My granddaughter asked why she had waited until eighteen, and her grandmother had apparently left the answer in a second envelope. She opened it while we were on the phone, went completely silent, and then said, “Grandpa, this letter is dated next week.”
