My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.
About sixty of them, spread over the whole fifteen years, did not have the post office stamp on them.
Those had a line of handwriting across the front instead.
Not at this address.
I knew that handwriting. I lived with it for eleven years. It was on the grocery list stuck to my refrigerator for two years after she left because I could not make myself take it down.
She was writing that with her own hand on envelopes addressed in the handwriting of her nine-year-old.
I never told the girls. Not once, in fifteen years. When they asked, in the early days, I said she was far away and that things were hard for her and that it wasn’t about them.
I lied to my children about their mother for a decade and a half to keep them from a purple stamp.
I have been asked since whether I regret it. I do, and I would do it again, and both of those are true at the same time and I have stopped trying to sort them out.
PART 3 — WHAT JUNIA DID
