I sat down right there on the floor of my mother bedroom, the airmail letters spread around me, my heart pounding with the arithmetic. The letters stopped in the spring. I was born that December. And they were signed with a name I had never heard in my life.
I sat there a long time, afraid of what it meant. And then, because I could not help it, I let myself read more than one line. And the truth was the opposite of what I feared.
The man who signed those letters was my father.
I had never heard the name because it was not the name we called him. Everyone in my whole life knew my daddy by his middle name, Ray. But those letters, written when he was a young airman stationed at Brookley, courting my mother from far away, were signed with his given first name, the one on his birth certificate, the one he stopped using the day he came home. A name my mother alone knew him by, from when they were young and in love and the whole world was ahead of them.
Yours until the stars go out, he had signed the last one, in the spring of 1961.
The letters stopped that spring because that spring he came home for good. He married my mother in the summer. And I was born that December, nine months later, exactly as a first child so often is, to a young couple who could hardly wait.
There was no scandal. There was no other man. There was only my father, so young in those letters I did not recognize the boy he had been, signing a name he would set aside for the rest of his quiet married life, promising my mother the stars.
She kept those letters on the top shelf, behind the good linens, for sixty years. My baptism card was tucked in with them. My mother had bundled up the beginning of their love story and carried it with her all the way to the end, the proof of the boy who wrote her the way only one kind of man writes a woman. Her husband. My daddy.
I read them all that afternoon, sitting on her floor, and I met my parents as they were before I existed, two kids in love across an ocean of miles, signing letters with a name that was a secret between them.
I almost did not open that box, out of respect. I am so glad I did. It did not hold a scandal. It held the truest love I have ever read, from a father I only ever knew as a quiet old man named Ray, who was once a young man with a different name and a heart full of stars, writing home to the girl he was going to marry.
My whole life is right there in the arithmetic. Spring to December. Their beginning, and then me. Exactly as it should be.