“Did he ever try to come back?”
Long silence.
“He wrote,” she whispered. “For years. Birthday cards. Letters. I sent them all back unopened. I moved us twice. Eventually they stopped coming.”
“They didn’t stop because he gave up,” I said, understanding now. “They stopped because he couldn’t find us.”
“Yes,” my mother said.
I thought about a man driving an ice cream truck through suburban neighborhoods in his sixties.
A man who, somehow, after twenty-five years, had found his granddaughter ordering strawberry shortcake, and hadn’t been able to make himself drive away.
“He found us anyway,” I said. “Twenty-five years later. And the first thing he did was buy a little girl an ice cream and tell her it was her mom’s favorite.”
I didn’t sleep that night.
But by morning, I knew I was going to Riverside Park on Saturday.
