At Dad’s apartment, I dumped the grocery bag onto the kitchen table.
Mr. Lewis stayed by the door.
“Don’t explain anything for him,” I said.
Birthday cards spilled across the table.
Then cancer took him.
I opened one with a cartoon ladybug on the front. Mom had written, “I hope she has a wonderful fifth birthday. Tell her I think about her.”
There was no “I love you” and no request to call.
Every card was addressed to Dad, and every message spoke about me as if I belonged to someone else.
“You can stop,” Mr. Lewis said.
“No. I need the whole truth.”
Under the cards sat canceled tuition checks dated after Mom disappeared.
There was no “I love you.”
The first equaled nearly three months of our old rent. More followed, covering almost two years.
I remembered canned soup, my patched coat, and the night Dad turned a power outage into a camping game.
“He quit school and paid for hers?”
Mr. Lewis nodded. “He’d promised before you were born. He thought stability might bring her back.”
I stared at Dad’s signature, written by the hand that packed my lunches and filled out every school form.
“She took his money and built another family.”
I remembered canned soup
“He paid the tuition directly.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
His answer stopped me.
He wasn’t trying to polish the truth.
I searched the bag.
At the bottom was a wall calendar rolled into a tube.
“He paid the tuition directly.”
Several dates were circled in red.
They matched the postmarks on Mom’s cards and the dates of the tuition checks.
Beside my fifth birthday, Dad had written four words.
“Wait one more week.”
I touched the faded ink.
“He was waiting for her to call.”
Dad had written four words.
Mr. Lewis looked toward Dad’s empty chair. “He kept track of every contact.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“I think the answer is in the letter.”
A thick envelope rested beneath the calendar.
My name was written across it.
I sat down before opening it.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Daddy’s Bug,
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