Cleaning out the family house in Sioux Falls after Mom\u2019s passing, I found the hatbox exactly where I knew it would be\u2014on the top shelf of her closet, behind the quilts.<\/p>\n
Inside were photographs, funeral cards, my baby shoes wrapped in tissue, and old Christmas cards.<\/p>\n
Then I found a bundle of letters tied with a blue ribbon.<\/p>\n
Airmail envelopes.<\/p>\n
They were addressed to Mom in a strong, slanted hand.<\/p>\n
At first, I smiled.<\/p>\n
I thought they were Dad\u2019s letters from Vietnam. Everyone knew he had written to her while he was overseas.<\/p>\n
But they weren\u2019t from Dad.<\/p>\n
They were signed by a man named Roy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And Roy didn\u2019t write to my mother like a friend.<\/p>\n I read only one full page.<\/p>\n One sentence has haunted me ever since:<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll have made your choice by the time this reaches you, and I won\u2019t blame you for it. But if you keep the promise you made me at the depot, then someday the child will know my name.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The child.<\/p>\n The letters stopped in March 1967.<\/p>\n I was born in November.<\/p>\n I sat on my mother\u2019s bed, holding the papers, realizing that the question I had never known to ask had an answer.<\/p>\n My father had been dead eleven years.<\/p>\n Mom was gone too.<\/p>\n Neither had ever mentioned Roy.<\/p>\n Then I found a photograph.<\/p>\n A young soldier.<\/p>\n On the back was Roy\u2019s last name and a town in Nebraska.<\/p>\n My grandfather had once told me our family had relatives there.<\/p>\n I searched the name.<\/p>\n Three listings.<\/p>\n One man was the right age to be Roy\u2019s younger brother.<\/p>\n Monday morning, I put the letters in my tote bag, told my husband everything, and we backed out of the driveway pointed toward Nebraska.<\/p>\n Four hours later, we pulled up outside a small white house.<\/p>\n An elderly man answered the door.<\/p>\n I held up the photograph.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you related to Roy?\u201d<\/p>\n His expression changed instantly.<\/p>\n \u201cWho are you?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy mother was Margaret.\u201d<\/p>\n He stared at me.<\/p>\n Then he whispered:<\/p>\n \u201cCome inside.\u201d<\/p>\n We sat at his kitchen table.<\/p>\n His name was Frank.<\/p>\n Roy had been his older brother.<\/p>\n For several minutes, nobody spoke.<\/p>\n Finally, Frank reached into a cabinet and pulled out a small wooden box.<\/p>\n \u201cI’ve wondered for fifty years whether you’d ever come.\u201d<\/p>\n My hands began shaking.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n He opened the box.<\/p>\n Inside was another photograph of Roy.<\/p>\n And a letter.<\/p>\n Frank told me Roy and my mother had been in love before Dad ever entered the picture.<\/p>\n Roy had been drafted and was preparing to leave for Vietnam when Mom told him she was pregnant.<\/p>\n He wanted to marry her.<\/p>\n He wanted to come home and raise their child.<\/p>\n But Mom was terrified.<\/p>\n She had already decided to marry my father.<\/p>\n \u201cShe promised Roy that someday you would know his name,\u201d Frank said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRoy never came home.\u201d<\/p>\n I stared at the photograph.<\/p>\n \u201cDid he know I was born?\u201d<\/p>\n Frank nodded.<\/p>\n \u201cHe knew. Your mother sent him one last letter.\u201d<\/p>\n My heart sank.<\/p>\n \u201cDid he ever see a picture of me?\u201d<\/p>\n Frank shook his head.<\/p>\n \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n Then he reached into the box again.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was supposed to be yours.\u201d<\/p>\n He placed a small envelope in my hand.<\/p>\n Inside was Roy\u2019s military identification tag.<\/p>\n My fingers closed around it.<\/p>\n For the first time, I had something that had belonged to the man whose blood I carried.<\/p>\n Frank looked at me and said quietly:<\/p>\n \u201cRoy used to say that if he didn’t make it home, he wanted his child to know he loved them.\u201d<\/p>\n I couldn’t hold back the tears.<\/p>\n All those years, I had thought my father was the only man who had loved my mother.<\/p>\n I had thought my family story was simple.<\/p>\n It wasn’t.<\/p>\n There had been another man.<\/p>\n A young soldier who had written letters from Vietnam.<\/p>\n A man who died without ever meeting his child.<\/p>\n That night, my husband and I drove back to Sioux Falls.<\/p>\n I placed Roy’s photograph beside my mother’s.<\/p>\n Then I put the military tag beneath it.<\/p>\n I stared at them for a long time.<\/p>\n Finally, I whispered:<\/p>\n \u201cMom, I wish you’d told me.\u201d<\/p>\n Then I touched the photograph.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd Roy\u2026 I finally know your name.\u201d<\/p>\n For fifty-nine years, a promise had remained buried in a hatbox.<\/p>\n Now it was finally kept.<\/p>\n **I wasn’t just my father’s daughter.<\/p>\n I was Roy’s child too.**<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cleaning out the family house in Sioux Falls after Mom\u2019s passing, I found the hatbox exactly where I knew it would be\u2014on the top shelf of her closet, behind the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":146622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-honglay"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146623,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146621\/revisions\/146623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/146622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/honglay168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}