The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

Around nine Glen got up and went down the hall to our room and he was gone a while, and when he came back he had the shoebox.

I had put it on the top shelf of our closet in May and I did not think he knew it was there. He knew it was there. He set it in the middle of the table and he took the lid off, and inside were the cards nobody had opened yet, the ones for the back half of the year. His own fiftieth in November. My birthday in December. Ty’s in January. All of them sealed, stamped, sorted, in Pop’s hand.

“I keep thinking I should open mine now,” Glen said. “Get it over with. And I can’t.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“No,” he said. He looked at Casey’s arm one more time. “No, I think we read them on the days. I think that’s what he wanted. One more of these a few more times.” He put the lid back on gentle. “He planned it out so we’d hear from him all year. Stubborn old man. He figured out how to get the last word from six feet down.”

Casey laughed, wet and sudden. Glen almost smiled.

I would like to tell you everything was mended that night and we all slept like babies, but grief does not work on a schedule and neither does a family. There were hard days after. But something had turned at that table, and it stayed turned. Glen started saying Pop’s name again. He started coming in for supper and sitting through it. In October he took Casey out to the north quarter where Pop found him, or where Glen found Pop, and he showed her the fence they had built together the last fall Pop was alive, and he told me later that he put two fingers up at the end the way his dad used to and said steady on to nobody in particular, to the fence, to the field, and that it did not fix anything but it loosened something.

On his fiftieth birthday in November, Glen opened Pop’s card at the breakfast table with all of us there, because Casey made him, because she said that is the rule now, we open them together. His card said what you would expect a father to write a son who was turning fifty, which is to say not very much and absolutely everything, and it was signed steady on, and Glen read it twice and folded it into his shirt pocket like always, but this time he did not go out to the shop. He stayed and finished his coffee.