“…He looked like Dad, Carl. Did he?” Linda asked, and I closed my eyes in my father kitchen, with the phone against my ear and the old red toolbox sitting on the table in front of me like an unexploded gift. I thought of the heavyset man in the Steelers cap, the way he had opened every drawer and run his thumb along the edge of the bottom tray, and the long look he had given me before he paid. “Linda,” I said, “he had Dad eyebrows. I noticed it and I told myself I was imagining it. He had the same way of tilting his head.”
I did not sleep. At six the next morning, I drove to the Erie Bank on State Street and waited on the steps until the doors opened. A teller named Mrs. Dombek took my father paperwork and my key, and led me down to the vault, past the great round door, and drew out safe deposit box 212. It was long and narrow. Inside lay a thick envelope, yellowed, sealed with wax, addressed in my father blocky printing: To the son I never met, and to the son I did. I sat down in a little booth with a lamp, and with trembling fingers I broke the seal.
The letter was four pages. Stan wrote that in the spring of 1956 he had been twenty five years old and engaged to a girl named Anna Wisniewski, the daughter of a baker in Erie. When her family discovered she was expecting, they sent her to relatives in Buffalo and forbade him to write. He was a young man without money or courage, and he obeyed. “That is the sin of my life,” he wrote. “Not that I loved her. That I let her go.” A son was born in January of 1957, and was named Michael. Stan did not meet him for twenty four years.
A false bottom hand cut from steel, a photograph from 1956, and a lunch left wrapped on a bench.
He wrote that Anna had never married. She had raised the boy alone, cleaning offices in Buffalo, and Stan had sent money every month, in an envelope with no return address, for forty years. In 1980, when the boy was twenty three and out of work, Anna told him to go to Erie. There was a job at General Electric. Ask for a man named Stan Ostrowski, she said, and tell him you are a hard worker. She did not tell Michael why. And my father, the quiet, stubborn man who kept his toolbox locked, opened the door of his shop, looked at a young stranger with his own eyebrows, and hired him that same morning.
I had to stop reading. I put the pages on the table and breathed. For twenty years, my father had worked beside his son and never once told him. He had taught him to read a micrometer, to set a cutter, to tell good steel from bad by the sound it made. He had stood godfather at the boy wedding, without a word of explanation. “I did not dare,” Stan wrote. “If I told him, I would have to tell your mother, and your sister, and you. I was a coward. But I was a coward who was near him, every day, and perhaps that was all I could do.”
The last page was addressed to me. He wrote that I was a good son, and a better electrician than he ever was a machinist, and that the belt I got in 1967 was the worst thing he ever did. He wrote that the toolbox held the tools Michael had used his first year, and that the savings bonds underneath were for both of us, equally. And then: “Carl, if this letter reaches you, then I am gone and Michael has found you, or you have found him. Be kind to him. He is the best of me. He just does not know it yet.”
The man in the Steelers cap was named Michael Dombrowski, and he lived in a brick ranch house in Millcreek Township. His wife Donna answered the door in an apron, and her face told me everything. She had known I would come. Behind her, in the kitchen, a heavy man in a plaid shirt rose slowly from the table. He had been crying. We stood facing each other for what felt like an hour, two gray headed men of sixty six and sixty nine with the same eyebrows. Then I held out the letter, and he took it, and read.
He read it standing up, the whole thing. When he finished he sat down hard, put his face in his hands, and said through his fingers, “He used to leave me his lunch. When I was new. A sandwich, wrapped in wax paper, on my bench. I thought it was a kindness. I never knew it was a father.” Donna put an arm around his shoulders. I sat down across from him. I said the only thing I could think of: that my father had raised one son in his house, and the other at his workbench, and that they had both turned out well.
My sister flew in from Phoenix the following Friday. Linda met Michael in the driveway, and the two of them stood in the cold for a long time, not speaking, and then she took his face in her hands and said, “You have Mom laugh. I do not know how.” We sat at his kitchen table until midnight, three siblings, with a plate of Donna pierogi and a bottle of Zywiec, trading every story we had of the same man. It was the first time in my life I had laughed at my father and loved him in the same moment.
We split the savings bonds in thirds, though Michael argued. We took the toolbox back down into my father basement, and Michael and I rebuilt the bottom tray together, with a new steel plate, and a hinged lid. Inside, we laid the photograph of the young man on the dock and the young woman in the summer dress. On the back, beneath my father writing, Michael wrote four words in his own square hand: Found you, Dad. Forgiven. We screwed the lid shut, side by side, and left it on the workbench, where it belongs.