inside that hidden compartment was a stack of envelopes, tied with string, and the one on top had my name on it in my uncle’s blocky hand. There were forty of them. One for every birthday of my life.
My uncle wrote me a letter every single year — and never once gave me one. He’d tuck it up under that slate where no one would find it, and open the compartment each birthday to add the new one. That’s why he never let anyone move the table.
I sat on that cold basement floor and read my whole life through the eyes of a man I thought I barely knew. My father — his little brother — died when I was four, and I always believed my quiet uncle just kept to himself. But the letters told the truth. He’d been there the whole time, in the shadows, too shy and too respectful of my father’s memory to ever step forward and claim the word. “I paid for your braces and told your mama it was a church fund,” one said. “I sat in the back at your graduation so I wouldn’t intrude.” “I taught you to shoot pool the summer you were ten, and it was the best summer of my life.”
Forty years of a father’s love from a man who never let himself be called one. Every lonely night he spent at that table, he wasn’t playing alone at all — he was sitting up with me.
The last letter was dated three weeks before he passed. He knew by then. “If you’re reading these,” he wrote, “then I finally found the nerve to give them to you the only way I could — by leaving. I hope it’s enough. You were the son I never had the right to say I had.”
I kept the table. I play most nights now. And I am never once playing alone.