My father pulled me off the dance floor on prom night, held his hand out for my phone, and said, “You’re on a plane in nine days, Jalen. End it with that girl tonight or I end it for you.” I handed it over. It took me fourteen years and a hospital bed to learn what he did with everything that came after.
Summer and I had been together since we were eleven, and half of Kenosha talked about our wedding like it was booked.
Her mother, Leticia, treated it like a rash that would clear up.
“It’s a crush, not a life,” she said one Sunday, passing me the potatoes.
My father just bought four tickets to Stuttgart.
On the last song Summer pressed her forehead into my rented vest and held on.
“I’ll find you,” I said.
“I’ll be right here,” she said, and her mascara was already going.
Nine days later I was in an apartment that smelled like somebody else’s cigarettes.
I wrote every week for two years, and the Esposito landline turned into a recording.
“Let it go, son. She has,” my father said when I asked if anything had come.
Nothing ever came back.
He kept a post office box I never saw, her mother kept a shoebox, and between them they buried EVERY SINGLE LETTER.
I searched anyway: Facebook, a classmate at the license office, the house on 22nd Avenue, which had a new family and a blue trampoline.
Fourteen years of that.
In March I flew home for good, rented a gray sedan at O’Hare and drove north without sleeping.
I made it as far as the last exit.
A pickup ran the light at the bottom of the ramp and folded my door in.
The ambulance didn’t go back toward the city. It took me to the county hospital two miles from my old street.
I was out for three days.
When I came up, a woman in navy scrubs sat by my bed with my hand in both of hers.
Her thumb was moving over my knuckles.
She was SMILING.
And I KNEW THAT SMILE before I knew my own name.
Room 214
It was Summer.
Older in the face, a pen stuck behind one ear, her hair pulled back tight the way she used to wear it for volleyball. Her badge hung off the pocket of the scrubs, turned a little sideways. SUMMER ESPOSITO, RN.
I read it twice. Esposito.
My mouth was so dry the first try at her name came out as air. She let go with one hand, got a cup off the tray and held the straw where I could reach it.
“Small sips,” she said. “You’ve been out since Sunday.”
“Summer.”
“Hi, Jalen.”
She put her hand back over mine and the thumb started up again like it had never stopped. Behind her there was a whiteboard with my name on it in green marker, and under it a nurse’s name that wasn’t hers. MINDY.
“You’re not my nurse,” I said.
“I’m on my break. I work the other hall.” She looked at the door. “I saw your name on the census Sunday night and I about dropped a cup of pills on the floor.”
I tried to sit up. My whole left side said no, and a machine somewhere behind my head started beeping about it. She reached over without looking and shut it off.
“Ribs,” she said. “Three of them. And your collarbone. The man in the pickup is fine, if you were going to ask.”
I wasn’t going to ask. I was looking at her hands. No ring.
“How long have you been sitting here?”
“Every break since Sunday.” She said it like a time sheet. “Mindy lets me.”
There was a lot I wanted to say and none of it came out in order. What I said was, “I wrote you.”
She didn’t answer that. She checked the bag on my IV pole, which wasn’t her job, and wrote something on a paper towel and put it in her pocket.
“Your dad’s on your emergency card,” she said. “They called him Sunday. He’s flying in from Germany.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He called the desk last night and asked who the woman was that kept coming in here.” She fixed my blanket where it had slid off my feet. “They didn’t tell him. I asked them not to.”
The key on his ring
The nine days between prom and the plane, my father was the calmest man in Kenosha.
That’s what people liked about him. He was the guy on our block who came over with a toolbox when your furnace quit in January and wouldn’t take twenty dollars for it. He coached my Little League team two years and never once yelled at an umpire. My mother used to say he could talk a dog off a meat truck.
He packed our whole duplex like a job. Boxes labeled on two sides. My mother wrapping plates in the Kenosha News. My sister Tammy, thirteen, crying in the bathroom about a boy named Delano and coming out to pack more.
On the third night he sat me down at the kitchen table, and he had his key ring out, the heavy one, car keys and house keys and the shed. There was a new key on it. Small, brass, with a white paper tag hung off it by a string, and on the tag he’d written 1187.
“Office box,” he said, and slid an index card across the table. Postfach 1187, 70173 Stuttgart. “Mail goes there till we’ve got a real address. The apartment’s not certain yet. Give it to whoever needs it.”
“Summer needs it.”
“Then give it to Summer.” He put the ring back in his pocket. “You’ll thank me in ten years, Jalen. Not this week. In ten years.”
He said that a lot. About braces, about summer school, about selling my dirt bike. You’ll thank me in ten years.
I still didn’t have my phone. He’d kept it in the glove box since prom.
The day before we left I walked to the Esposito house. I knew that house like my own. Sunday dinners for six years, the potatoes, the hall closet where Leticia kept her whole life in shoeboxes, every one of them labeled on the end in black marker. RECEIPTS 2009. TAXES. RECIPES. CHRISTMAS CARDS. I used to read the ends of those boxes while I waited for Summer to come down.
Summer came out on the porch. Leticia stayed in the doorway with her arms folded, and she didn’t move the whole time.
I’d brought the prom picture, the one where Summer’s looking at me and not at the camera. On the back I’d copied the address off the index card, every letter, the 1187 and all.
“Write me there,” I said. “Till we get the apartment.”
Summer held the picture against her chest. Leticia said, “Okay, that’s enough now,” and Summer went in.
That was the last time I saw her until the hospital.
In Room 214, fourteen years later, Summer stood and checked her watch.
“Break’s over,” she said. “I’m back at seven tomorrow.”
“Is he here yet?”
“His flight lands at O’Hare at two tomorrow.” She was at the door. “He’ll want to know who I am, Jalen. Do you want him to?”
The paper cup
She came at seven like she said, with two coffees in paper cups, and put one on my tray where I could get at it with my good hand.
Mindy came in behind her to do my vitals. She was maybe fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she looked from Summer to me and back.
“So this is the one,” Mindy said.
“Mindy,” Summer said.
“I’m just taking a blood pressure.” She wrapped my arm and pumped it and looked at the number and didn’t say it out loud. “You two have twenty minutes before I need her on the other hall. Use them.”
She shut the door on her way out.
Summer sat down in the chair. She didn’t take my hand this time. She held the coffee with both of hers.
“I wrote you every Sunday,” I said. “For two years. From the box, then from the apartment, once we had it. I called your house till the number went dead. I looked for you every way I could think of.”
“I know.”
“I asked my father every week if anything came. Every week. He said you’d let it go.”
“I wrote you nine times,” she said. “To the address on the back of the picture. The first two months.”
“Nothing came.”
“Something came.” She set the coffee down. “In October. One letter. Typed.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never typed a letter to her in my life. I wrote her by hand on graph paper because I liked the lines.
“What did it say?”
“It said you’d met somebody in Germany. It said I should stop writing because it was making it harder for you. It said not to wait.” Her voice stayed level, but she was turning the cup around and around on the tray. “It was signed J. Just the letter.”
“I didn’t write that.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said.
“How do you know?”
She looked at the door like she was checking for Mindy.
“Because I’ve got the hundred and four you did write, Jalen. I’ve had them since November.”
Leticia E.
She had to go before she could tell me the rest. Mindy came back and stood in the door, and Summer squeezed my foot through the blanket on her way past.
My father got there at 4:40.
He came in the way he came into everybody’s kitchen, with a bag from the gift shop and that calm face. He was sixty-three now and grayer, with the same jacket he’d worn in Stuttgart for ten years. He put a balloon on my tray table that said GET WELL in blue.
“Look at you,” he said, and he put his hand on my head like I was nine. “I talked to the doctor. Dr. Leung. Good man. Friday, maybe Saturday, and we’ll get you out of here.”
“We?”
“You’re not driving a rental to some apartment with three broken ribs. You’ll come back with me till you’re right.” He pulled the chair over. It was the chair Summer used. “Your mother’s got your old room made up.”
“Dad. Summer works here.”
He was setting his bag down when I said it. He finished setting it down.
“Summer Esposito,” I said. “She’s a nurse on the other hall. She’s been sitting with me.”
“Well.” He folded his jacket over the back of the chair. “Small town.”
“She says she wrote me. To the box. The first two months.”
“Jalen, we went over this when you were nineteen.”
“She says she wrote nine times.”
“Then the German post office lost nine letters.” He smiled at me. “That happens. You know what that place was like.”
That was my first try at it and it went nowhere. He just stood there being reasonable.
At five Mindy came in to hang a new bag on the pole, and my father turned to her with the calm face on.
“That nurse from the other hall,” he said. “I’d like her kept out of this room. He needs rest. I’m his next of kin.”
Mindy finished hanging the bag. She didn’t look at him till she was done.
“She’s not his nurse,” she said. “She comes on her break. And he’s thirty-two years old, sir. He decides who comes in.”
“I’m asking you nicely.”
“And I’m telling you nicely. It’s his room.”
My father nodded like she’d said something smart. Then he took his phone out of his jacket and said he had to make a call, he’d be right back, and he stepped out into the hall.
He didn’t shut the door all the way. I could see him by the window at the end with his back half to me, and he had the phone held out in front of him, scrolling for somebody.
He found it and hit it and put it to his ear. Before he did, for a second, the screen faced my way.
LETICIA E.
The shoebox
He didn’t come back in. He texted me at seven that he was beat from the flight and had gotten a room at the Holiday Inn Express across the lot, and he’d see me at nine.
Summer came at 9:15 that night, after her shift, in a sweatshirt over the scrubs. She had a shoebox under her arm.
It was an old one, Payless, with a lid that had gone soft at the corners. On the end, in black marker, in handwriting I had read a hundred times waiting at the bottom of the stairs, it said J.H.
She put it on my tray next to the balloon and took the lid off.
Envelopes. Standing up on their edges, packed so tight the box had bowed out at the sides. Airmail. The red and blue stripe around the border. My handwriting, a hundred and four times. Every one of them had been opened with a knife, clean along the top.
“She read them,” Summer said. “All of them. She moved to a condo in Pleasant Prairie last fall and I was cleaning out the hall closet for her. It was behind TAXES.”
I touched the top of one. I didn’t take it out. I could remember what was in some of them and I didn’t want to read them in front of her.
“What did she say?”
“She said, ask his father.” Summer sat down. “That’s all I got out of her. She hasn’t really talked to me since.”
Then she reached into the back pocket of her scrubs and took out one more envelope, and this one was folded in half and soft as cloth from being folded and unfolded.
“This is the one I got,” she said.
The address on the front was typed. Her name, the house on 22nd Avenue. A German stamp, the Stuttgart postmark, 09.10.2012.
The return address was typed too.
Postfach 1187, 70173 Stuttgart.
I took the letter out. One page, typed, printer paper. I read it out loud because I needed to hear it.
“Summer. I’ve met somebody here and I think it’s real. Please stop writing, it makes it harder. Don’t wait for me. I know this hurts but you’ll thank me in ten years. J.”
I read the last line again. I didn’t have to. I knew it by heart from the kitchen table.
“That’s not me,” I said.
“I know.”
“No. Summer. That’s him. That’s his line. He said that to me about my braces.”
She didn’t say anything. She just took the letter back and folded it on the old fold.
“He had the key on his ring,” I said. “1187. On a little paper tag. He told me it was for the office.”
“I wrote back to it,” Summer said. “Three times after that one. I told you I didn’t believe you. I told you to call me.” She put the letter in her pocket. “And then I stopped.”
She looked out my window at the Holiday Inn sign across the lot.
“What time is he coming?”
“Nine.”
“Then I’m coming at nine,” she said.
Nine o’clock
He came at 8:55 with two coffees and one of them was for me, and when he saw Summer in the chair he held onto it.
“Summer,” he said. “Look at you. A nurse.”
She didn’t get up. The shoebox was on my tray with the lid off. The typed letter was on top of the envelopes, open.
He looked at the box a long time. He set the coffees on the windowsill.
I picked up the letter with my good hand and held it out to him.
He didn’t take it. He didn’t need to.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’m not going to stand here and lie to you. You’re grown.”
He pulled the door shut behind him. Then he stayed standing, by the end of the bed, with his hands on the rail.
“Leticia called me the Monday after the prom. I didn’t call her. She called me. She said this one had a full ride to the nursing program at Carthage, and she was going to turn it down and follow you to Germany. That was her plan. Did you know that? She was going to wait tables in a country where she couldn’t read the menu.”
Summer didn’t answer.
“And you,” he said to me. “You told your mother you were going to stay. Get a job at the warehouse in Pleasant Prairie and an apartment over the bar on Sheridan. Eighteen years old. You were going to throw it away for a girl from the next street over.”
“So you wrote her,” I said.
“I wrote her one letter. One. Leticia took care of her end.” He tapped the bed rail. “And you know what, I’d do it again. Look at the two of you. She’s a nurse. You’ve got a career and a pension and you speak two languages. You’d have been nothing. You’d have been two kids in a basement with a baby. I gave you both a life.”
“You had my letters,” Summer said. “My nine.”
“I have them,” he said. “I didn’t throw out a single one. I’m not an animal.”
That stopped me.
“Where?”
“My desk. Bottom drawer. Rubber band around them.” He looked at me. “They’re yours, son. You fly back with me Saturday, and you can sit at the kitchen table and read every one of them. Your mother wants you home.”
“Send them,” I said.
“No.”
He said it easy. The way he’d said no about the dirt bike.
“You come home, they’re yours. You stay here with—” he moved his hand at Summer, at the box, at the whole room, “this, and they stay where they are. That’s fair. That’s a fair deal.”
Then he held his hand out across the bed rail, palm up.
“Give me your phone,” he said. “I’ll change your flight to Saturday. You can’t do it with one arm anyhow.”
My phone was on the tray next to the shoebox. The hospital had kept it in a bag with my wallet and Summer had plugged it in for me on Monday.
I looked at his hand. Same hand. Same open palm.
I put my own hand flat on top of the phone.
“Jalen.”
I reached over with the same hand and pressed the call button on the rail.
He kept talking while we waited. About my mother, about her knees, about how she’d cried on the phone Sunday. About Tammy’s kids asking about me. About how I’d always been like this, stubborn, ever since I was small. He talked the whole time, and I didn’t answer him once, and Summer sat in the chair with her coffee and didn’t look at him.
Mindy came in with her glasses on the chain.
“Can you take him off my card,” I said. “The emergency contact.”
Mindy looked at my father. She looked at me.
“You want somebody else on it?”
“Leave it blank for now.”
“Okay,” she said, and wrote it on her hand.
My father put his hand back in his pocket. He took his jacket off the chair. He left his coffee on the windowsill.
At the door he turned around.
“Those letters stay in that drawer,” he said. “You understand me? I’m not mailing them. Not in ten years. Not ever.”
“Okay,” I said.
He went out, and he shut the door all the way this time.
22nd Avenue
They let me out the second week of April. Summer drove.
I didn’t ask her where we were going. She went down Sheridan and turned on 22nd Avenue and pulled over across from the house.
The blue trampoline was still in the yard, faded now, with a basketball sitting in the middle of it. Somebody had painted the porch gray. There was a kid’s bike lying on its side in the grass.
My arm was still in the sling. The shoebox was on the floor of her car between my feet, where it had been since the hospital. I’d read about thirty of them. I was going slow.
The other nine are still in a desk drawer in Stuttgart, as far as I know. My mother calls on Sundays. She doesn’t bring him up and I don’t. Tammy sends me pictures of her boys.
I never read one word Summer wrote me at eighteen. I’ve asked her what was in them. She tells me some of it. Not all.
We sat in the car a while with the engine running and looked at the house.
Then she turned in her seat and held out her hand, palm up.
“Phone,” she said.
I got it out of my jacket with my good hand and gave it to her.
She typed for a while, longer than a number takes, and handed it back. She’d put herself in under SUMMER, with the old house number from this street where the address goes.
“Now,” she said, and put the car in drive. “Don’t you make me look for you again.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to somebody who still has a box of old letters in a closet somewhere.
For more family secrets and hard-won reckonings, read the mortgage burned in her sink and the hospice visitor who listed a wife as an “occupant”. And page two of a missing son’s notebook holds another heartbreaking discovery.
