If you’ve ever wondered where I keep my my stash of little treasures, I will tell you now. The wooden box high on the shelf in my closet. My father’s hat, the Kleenex my mother kissed, the lipstick barely there now, an eyelash I once wished on right before I met your father, carefully taped to a piece of paper (wishing on an eyelash was a belief held by the coworker at Filene’s whose name I can’t recall!). The beads that were on your perfect little wrists right after you were born, the cards that said your name and gender there in the nursery viewing room. Letters. Notes. My father’s scribbles: BRB.

I’ve always known that I am not the kind of woman your father is naturally attracted to. I think his eye is drawn to my opposite: the brightly plumed strutters. His young colleague was of the plumed sort; Becca, think Carla Robinson in your high school class (remember? the girl who, like an ill-trained dog or toddler, always wanted what someone else had), except that this young woman was the high-voltage of a Carla coupled with a scholarly pedigree and some genuine academic success, which perhaps was just the right combination (or wrong, from my point of view). She was (perhaps still is) the kind of person who makes you want to cross yourself when you see them coming.

“Harsh,” I can hear your father say. “You are so harsh.”

I say truthful.

I love the memory of your father watching me as I passed a silly orange under my chin, onto the throat of a handsome young man in banking, originally from Chicago, Juicy Fruit gum and tobacco and that awful pineapple punch on his breath. That’s the memory I should give you. I didn’t even know your father, and on the walk home he seemed jealous of that total stranger I had stood so close to, a man I could have just as easily walked with that night. Now, that is not bigheaded of me to say; trust me that the competition was slim, but I did appreciate how attentive your father was as it neared time to leave. The walk to the train with him that night is still a place I like to go in my mind. I go there, and I wait outside your elementary school. I lie in my childhood bed and watch my mother descend the stairs.