…”face?”
He sat down on the step of his trailer like his legs had stopped working.
“Her name was Anne,” he said. “She was your grandmother’s oldest daughter. Your mother’s sister. And she was your mother. Your real one. I’m your father.”
Anne died the night I was born. Complications. The photograph in the suitcase was taken in the hospital an hour later. He’d burned his hand that same year, pulling a neighbor’s kid out of a kitchen fire, and he still had the bandage on in the picture.
He was twenty-nine, with no money and no family. Edith, my grandmother, said a baby needed a home with two parents and a yard. Her younger daughter, the woman I’ve called Mom my whole life, had just gotten married and couldn’t have children. So Edith made him an offer. She’d raise me in the family, with every advantage. He’d stay away, and she’d send him $2,000 a month, for as long as she lived.
“I said yes,” he said, not looking at me. “I’ve been ashamed of it for thirty years.”
The green suitcase was the only thing he’d asked for. Anne’s letters. My baby blanket. The one photo of the three of us. Edith had promised him that when she died, it would come back to him.
I gave it to him. Then he went into the trailer and came back with a bank book. He’d never spent the money. Not one dollar of it in twenty-two years. Over half a million dollars, in a savings account in my name.
“It was always yours,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to give it to you without breaking your family.”
I drove home and sat at my mom’s kitchen table and told her I knew. She cried and said she’d wanted to tell me every year on my birthday, and every year, she was afraid I’d love her less. I told her that wasn’t possible. It isn’t.
My dad came to Thanksgiving this year. Both of them. My mom set a place for him next to me. He brought the photograph, in a new frame, and put it on the mantel, and nobody said anything. We didn’t need to.
