…a shoebox, tied with string. I stood behind the closed door for a long time. Then I opened it. The man on my porch was in his fifties, gray-haired, wet from the dew, and he had my eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know he was gone until I saw the funeral notice. I didn’t know you lived here now. My name is Paul. I’m your father.”
I let him in. I don’t know why. Maybe because I already knew. He set the shoebox on the kitchen table and didn’t sit down until I told him to. “In 1993, I was twenty and I was an addict,” he said. “I stole from your grandfather. I crashed his truck. Your mother had just had you. Your grandfather told me if I ever came near the house again, he’d call the police. Then he told everyone I was dead. It was easier for him than saying I was gone.”
He looked out the window toward the tree line. “I got clean in 1994. I came back to tell him. He came out on the porch and told me to leave. So I stood at the trees instead. I just wanted to see you through the window. A little girl, eating cereal, doing homework. I came almost every night for thirty years.”
“He knew,” I whispered. “He had cameras on every tree.” Paul nodded slowly. “I know. I think that was his way of letting me stay.”
He opened the shoebox. It was full of letters. Hundreds. All addressed to me, all returned unopened in my grandfather’s handwriting: Return to sender. The last envelope, at the bottom, was different. It had been opened. Inside, my grandfather had written one sentence, dated a week before he died: “Paul, you can come to the door now.” It had never been mailed.
We read the letters together until the sun came up. My father has keys to the farmhouse now. He comes in through the front door. The cameras are still on the trees, but I turned off the alerts. Nobody needs to watch the tree line anymore.
