Two things were inside. A folded letter in Walter’s hand, and a photograph so old its corners had gone soft as cloth.
The photograph came first, and it made no sense.
It showed a much younger Walter — thirty, maybe — standing outside a municipal building somewhere with brick the color of rust. A dark-haired woman stood beside him. A little girl, no older than three, stood in front of them both in a yellow raincoat, clutching a small red doll against her chest.
The woman was not Diana. I had seen enough photographs of Diana, Walter’s wife of forty years, to know that much on sight.
The doll was the part that stopped my breath.
I had owned a doll exactly like it. Red yarn hair, a chipped painted smile, a dress my grandmother had sewn from a flour sack. I had buried it under a willow tree when I was seven years old, the week after my mother disappeared and never came home.
“This has to be someone else’s photo,” I said. “This has to be a mistake.”
“Read the letter, Margaret.”
My name, in his hand, at the top of the page. I had seen this handwriting on grocery lists and love notes and the margins of library books he underlined too much. I had never once seen it shake the way it shook on this page.
My dearest Margaret,
I told you the truth about how I made my fortune — commercial shipping, forty years of it. I never told you what it cost me to start.
Your mother’s name was Rose. You were three years old when I left.
I stopped there.
I had to stop there.
My grandmother told me my father died in a factory accident before I could walk. That was the whole story I’d been given, and I had built seventy-eight years of a life on top of it — foster placements, then state care, then thirty years shelving returns at the county library on a salary that never once cracked forty thousand dollars, then this room, this pension, this cafeteria chicken.
While six floors above me, the man in that story had been alive the entire time.
Eating dinner cooked by a private chef.
Playing chess with me on Tuesdays.
I made myself keep reading.
