The bottom drawer of my daddys dresser stuck and would not come, and he would have fixed it in five minutes with a bar of soap on the runners if he was still here to do it. But he was not. Six weeks now. I am Cheryl, I am fifty-four, and I had been putting off his bedroom the way you put off the thing you cannot stand to do.
Daddy was the plainest man God ever made. Worked the loading dock at the Eastman plant here thirty-eight years, came home, watched his westerns, went to bed. What you saw was what there was. He did not have secrets. He did not have the imagination for one, I used to joke.
So I emptied the drawer, socks and undershirts, and it still hung up on something when I tried to slide it back. I pulled it all the way out, and that is when I saw the back of the dresser, the part you never see, the part behind the drawer. There was something taped to the inside of that back panel. Down low. Where it would sit hidden behind a full drawer for as long as that drawer stayed shut, which, knowing Daddy, was going to be forever.
He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and taped it up flat against the wood. My daddy, who I would have sworn never once in his life had a single thing to hide. I peeled the tape and it came loose into my hand.
And I sat down right there on the bedroom floor, and I did not get up for a long while.
It was me. All of it was me.
Every school photo I ever brought home, the gap-toothed ones I thought he had thrown away. A lock of baby hair in a twist of wax paper, my name and birthday on it in my mothers hand. A ticket stub from the one father-daughter dance at the VFW when I was ten and stood on his shoes. A dried corsage. My first report card. A note I wrote him in crayon that just said i love you daddy, kept for fifty years.
The plainest man God ever made. No imagination, no secrets, nothing under the surface. And the whole time he had been keeping a shrine to his little girl taped behind a drawer that would never open, where he could go to it alone and nobody would ever catch a working man being soft.
There was one line on the back of my crayon note, his handwriting, pencil worn almost gone.
Everything good I ever did is in this handkerchief. Everything else was just work.
Fifty-four years old and I never knew. He never let me see it, not once, because men of his kind did not know how to hold a thing that tender out in the open. So he held it in the dark, behind a stuck drawer, every day for half a century.
I have that handkerchief on my own dresser now. I do not hide it. I look at it every morning, and I tell that plain, soft-hearted man good morning, same as I did for fifty-four years.