The book was three dollars and fifty cents and I almost left it right there on the shelf.

I go to the same Goodwill every Tuesday because Tuesday is half-price on the paperbacks, and at my age you learn to stretch a dollar.

I wasn’t even looking for anything special that day. But there it was, an old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, the cover all soft and bent at the corner like somebody had loved it. And I’ll be honest with you, I picked it up because of my Harold. That was his favorite book in the whole world. He read it every single fall, same as some folks watch football. Harold’s been gone four years now. His heart, just quit one morning at the breakfast table. So I tucked that little book under my arm like I was carrying a piece of him home.

I didn’t open it till that night. I was in my recliner with my tea, and when I cracked the cover, a folded paper slipped out and landed in my lap. Yellowed. Soft like cloth from being folded so long. The date in the corner said April 2003. And the first line, written in this careful, leaning handwriting, said, “To my daughter, who I will never meet.”

I want you to know I almost folded it back up. It felt like I was reading somebody’s mail, because I was. But I couldn’t stop. The man wrote that he was dying. Liver cancer, thirty-four years old, and his wife was seven months along with their first baby. He said he was running out of time, and he wanted his little girl to know who her daddy was, even if she’d only ever know him from a piece of paper.

He described himself like he was sitting right across from her. “Brown eyes, the kind that go squinty when I laugh.” Bad jokes nobody but him thought were funny. He said he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. And then he wrote a line that made me set my tea down. “You’ll have my hands. Your little fingers on the ultrasound look just like mine.” Can you imagine. A grown man dying, staring at a grainy ultrasound picture, finding himself in his baby’s fingers.

He kept going. “I won’t be there for your first word. Your first step.” Then, “I won’t be there for your first broken heart, and that one kills me most of all.” But he said he was fighting to hold on long enough to get this written down. And the very last line, the one I read about ten times in a row, said this. “Find the red box in Grandpa’s shed. It’s for your 18th birthday.”

That was it. No name. No way to know who she was or if she ever even got born. And I sat in that recliner a long time, just holding it.