It was a Tuesday afternoon. The house was dusty, smelling of old paper and stale coffee. I was in the living room, packing his Sears flannels into cardboard boxes. I found his old reading glasses on the side table, next to a half-empty box of cough drops.

I held those glasses for ten minutes, just staring at the dust on the lenses. My hands were shaking.

That was when I heard the knock on the front door.

I wiped my face on my sleeve and opened the heavy wooden door.

It was Albert. He was our mail carrier, an older man with gray hair who had walked this neighborhood for thirty years. He was holding a stack of circulars, but he didn’t hand them to me. Instead, he took off his blue postal cap and held it against his chest.

“Janet,” he said softly. “I saw your car out front. I wanted to stop by.”

“Hi, Albert,” I said, trying to force a polite smile. “Just packing things up.”

“I’m so sorry about Earl,” he said, looking past me into the dark hallway. “He was a good man. Stubborn as a mule, but a good man.”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “He was.”

Albert cleared his throat. He looked down at his boots, then back up at me with wet, serious eyes. “Can I tell you something about your dad, Janet? I’ve been keeping this to myself for years, but I think you need to hear it.”

I braced myself, my heart pounding against my ribs. “Okay.”

“I’ve had the Sunday delivery route on Elm Street for a long time,” Albert said. “And every single Sunday afternoon, no matter if it was freezing cold or pouring rain, your dad sat out on that porch in his green wicker chair. He’d have that brown checkered blanket wrapped around his shoulders.”

I stared at him. “He did?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Albert said. “One day, about five years ago, it was snowing pretty hard, and he was still sitting out there. I walked up the steps to hand him his mail, and I asked him, ‘Earl, what are you doing sitting out here in this freezing weather?'”

Albert’s voice cracked. He wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“He looked at me and said, ‘My girl drives by on her way to church, Albert. Same time every Sunday. I can see her blue car from here. I’m just waiting on the Sunday she decides to turn in. I want to be right here on the porch when she does.'”

My breath caught. It felt like someone had physically hit me in the chest.

“Five hundred Sundays,” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “He was waiting for me.”

“Every single one,” Albert said softly.

Albert reached into his leather mailbag. “There’s one more thing,” he said, pulling out a thick bundle tied with a dirty yellow rubber band. “He gave me these a few years back. He told me if anything ever happened to him, I had to make sure you got them. He didn’t have your address, or maybe he just didn’t have the nerve to mail them.”

I took the bundle. It was heavy.

I looked down at the top envelope. Written in my father’s shaky, blue-ink handwriting was my name: Janet.

“There are fourteen of them,” Albert whispered. “One for every year.”

I thanked him, but my voice was completely gone. I closed the door and walked out onto the porch. My legs felt like lead.

I sat down in his green wicker chair. I took the checkered wool blanket from the back of the chair and pulled it over my lap. It still smelled like him, sawdust and cheap tobacco.

I slid the yellow rubber band off the stack. The paper was yellowed at the edges. I opened the very first envelope, the oldest one from fourteen years ago. Inside was a simple birthday card with a picture of a yellow wildflower on the front.

I opened it. His writing was steadier back then.

Janet, it read. I’m sorry about what I said on the porch. I was angry because I worry about you. Dave is a good young man, and I know you’ll be happy. I hope you can forgive an old fool. Happy birthday. Love, Dad.

He had never mailed it. He had kept it in a drawer, waiting for me to turn my car into his driveway so he could hand it to me himself. And I had driven past him, week after week, holding onto my stupid, useless pride.

The tears finally came then. They washed over my face, hot and stinging, soaking into the paper of the card. I sat on that porch for three hours, wrapped in my mother’s blanket, reading fourteen years of apologies I was too stubborn to receive.

It cost me fourteen years of my father’s life to learn this lesson. I will never get those Sundays back. The house is empty, and he is gone, and the wicker chair is just wood and green paint now.

But as I packed up the last card and tied the rubber band back around them, I looked down Elm Street.

I got up and walked down the steps. I carried the checkered blanket and the stack of cards to my car and placed them gently on the passenger seat.

Next Sunday, when we head to church, I won’t be driving. I’m going to let my daughter Chloe take the wheel. She’s learning how to drive now, and she still gets nervous about making turns.

I’m going to teach her exactly how to turn early, how to slow down, and how to pull into the driveway of the people who love her before it’s too late.

That is what we are going to do next Sunday.