I thought helping my granddaughter clean out the attic would mean dust, old Christmas decorations, and a few embarrassing photographs from the 1980s.
I was wrong.
By the end of that afternoon, I was holding a letter written forty-two years earlier by the boy I had once planned to marry
A letter my own family had hidden from me.
It started when Ellie found my old prom album.
“Grandma!”
I turned around and immediately regretted it.
She was sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor with the album open in her lap.
“Look at your hair!”
“Oh, give me that.”
She pulled it away, laughing.
“It’s enormous.”
“It was 1984. We believed hairspray was a personality.”
She laughed harder.
I sat beside her while she flipped through the pages.
There was my mother standing stiffly beside me.
My father pretending not to be emotional.
My older brother Charlie making a ridiculous face behind my head.
