You can read Part 3 HERE.
Saturday came the way things do when you’ve been waiting for them …. too fast and too slow at once.
Helen Matthews met me at the door before I even knocked. She was smaller than I remembered, or maybe I’d just been fifteen the last time I’d seen her, and everything had been bigger then. She pressed the shoebox into my hands with both of hers and said, “Your father was a good man, Becca. I always thought so.”
I thanked her. I didn’t trust myself to say much more than that.
I sat in my rental car in the driveway of the house on Saunders Drive for a long time just thinking. The box was lighter than I’d expected. I turned it over in my lap and looked at my name in the black marker …. my father’s handwriting, which I’d almost managed to forget and now recognized immediately, the way you recognize a song you haven’t heard in twenty years.
Becca.
Just the one name. Like I was the only one he was talking to. Like there was no question.
I suddenly realized I didn’t want to be alone when I opened the box and instinctively drove to Jeff’s.
He lived in a small house at the end of a quiet street, the kind of street that still had old maples arching overhead. The porch light was on even though it was the middle of the afternoon, and I thought that was the sort of thing a person does when they’re expecting someone.
He came to the door before I knocked, which made me smile despite everything.
“Habit,” he said, nodding at the window beside the door. “I saw your car.”
He looked at the box under my arm and then at my face, and whatever he saw there made him step back without saying anything else. I followed him inside.
His kitchen smelled like coffee and something baking …. bread, or maybe muffins. His jacket was thrown over the back of a chair and a book was left open on the counter; the whole place had the comfortable disorder of someone who actually lived there rather than just occupying space. I liked it immediately.
He put the kettle on without asking. I set the shoebox on the table.
We both looked at it.
“You don’t have to open it right now,” he said.
“I know.” I pulled out a chair. “I want to. I just …. I wanted someone else in the room.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He just sat down across from me, folded his hands on the table, and waited. I’ve known very few people in my life who know how to wait. It turns out it’s the rarest thing.
The rubber band had gone brittle with age. It broke when I touched it. I lifted the lid.
There were letters. A dozen of them, maybe more, bundled with a piece of kitchen twine. Each one had my name on the front in that same handwriting …. some with dates, some without. Underneath the letters was a photograph I didn’t recognize at first: a man and a small girl sitting on the hood of a car, both squinting into the sun. I was maybe four. He looked so young I almost didn’t know him.
At the very bottom was a folded piece of paper, separate from the others. No envelope. Just my name on the outside fold.
I unfolded it.
He’d written it in pencil, the handwriting slower than the marker on the lid, more deliberate. It wasn’t long.
Becca,
By the time you read this, I hope you’re somewhere you chose. I hope the life you’re living is one that feels like yours. I couldn’t give you much. I was sick for so long before you knew I was sick, and then there wasn’t time. But I wrote things down. Everything I thought you might need someday. You’ll find it all in the letters. It’s just me …. who I was and what I was afraid of. I wanted you to know me a little. Not just as your father, but as a person who was trying. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for it. I hope you’re not too angry with me. I hope you have someone in your life and that person is worth having around.
Love, Dad
I don’t know how long I sat there.
At some point, Jeff got up and poured two cups of tea and set one in front of me without saying anything. I became aware that I’d been crying, not dramatically, just steadily, the way it rains on certain quiet days when the sky has finally decided to let something go.
I folded the letter back up along its creases.
“He said he hoped I was with someone who was worth having around,” I said.
Jeff looked at me across the table.
“And?”
I looked back at him. At this man who had shown up at my door with a stethoscope and stayed for something neither of us had names for yet. At the jacket on the chair and the open book and the small, real, lived-in life of him.
“So far so good,” I said.
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that didn’t need anything added to it.
Outside, the maples were starting to go gold at the edges. The kettle had gone quiet. I reached for my tea and thought about my father at thirty-seven, writing letters to a daughter he wouldn’t see grow up, hiding them in an attic on Saunders Drive, trusting that she’d find her way back when she was ready.
I thought: I think I finally am.
NAR©2026
End of Part 4. You can read Part 3 HERE.
This is “Please Read The Letter” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Everything on the elephant trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thank you for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 