The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

“Where did you get this,” Glen said. His voice had gone to almost nothing.

“The card,” Casey said. Her chin was still up but it was shaking now. “My sixteenth card. The one he wrote before. Mom gave it to me in the spring and I kept it in my sock drawer and I took a picture of just that part and I took it to the man in Pratt and he copied it exact. He traced it off the real one. It’s not a drawing he made up, Dad, it’s Pop’s. It’s actually his.”

I need to explain about the card.

Pop wrote his cards early. He always had. He bought a box of birthday cards at the Alco back when we still had one and then after that at the Dollar General, and every January he would sit at his own kitchen table and write out the whole year, everybody’s birthday, in advance, because he said he did not trust himself to remember and he did not trust the mail. He had Nadine’s handwriting to measure himself against, Glen’s mother, and she had died in 2011, and after that Pop wrote all the cards alone. He had written Casey’s sixteenth in January. He died in March. In May, when I was cleaning out the little desk in his front room because Glen could not make himself do it, I found the shoebox of cards all addressed and sealed and sorted by month, stamped and everything, every birthday in this family for the rest of the year written out in his hand by a man who did not know he would not be there to mail them.

I gave them out myself. That was the one thing I did that spring that I am sure was right. On each person’s birthday I put Pop’s card on their plate. Glen would not talk about it. He would open his and read it and put it in his shirt pocket and go out to the shop. When Casey’s birthday came in September I set his card by her cereal bowl and she opened it and read “steady on, Bug” in his hand and she got up from the table and went outside and sat in the bed of the old Ranger for an hour by herself, and I let her, and I thought that was the end of it.