I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t sleep that night. I just kept laying everything out on the kitchen table and reading those cards in order, watching his handwriting get a little shakier as the years went by.

The next morning I looked up the name on the envelopes. Wouldn’t you know it, she was right there. Living four miles from me. Four miles. Works at the Dollar General out on Route 7, the one I drive past to get to my doctor.

I drove out there. I don’t even remember the drive, honestly. I just remember sitting in that parking lot a good twenty minutes telling myself to go home, this wasn’t my business, leave it like Mama said. But I’d been leaving things alone my whole life. So I went in.

She was up at the register. And I want to tell you, I knew before I got halfway down the aisle. She had my father’s jaw. That exact same square jaw I’d looked at across the supper table for sixty years. She was ringing up a fella buying motor oil and laughing at something, and it was his laugh too, the way it crinkled up her whole face.

Then I got close enough to read her name tag. And the last name printed on it wasn’t Haskell. It was my last name. My family’s name. The name I’ve carried my whole life.

That’s when the floor kind of dropped out from under me, standing there by the candy display. Because the card said her mother was 17. And my parents, everybody knew the story, they were high school sweethearts who married young. Married at 18 and 20, my mother always said, proud as could be.

She just never said what came before the wedding. She never said there’d been a baby first, a baby her own parents took away from two scared teenagers and gave off to be raised by somebody else, under our family name, four miles up the road.