The shoebox under my father’s bed contained every birthday card I ever sent

Dear Delyara, My father was not sentimental. At least that is what I believed for fifty years. He opened birthday cards, read them, put them on the mantel for a week, then everything disappeared. After he died, my brother and I cleared his bedroom. Under the bed was a shoebox tied with garden string. Inside were every birthday card I had sent since I left home at nineteen. Cheap cards from university, cards written after arguments, cards my children signed with backwards letters, one I sent late and apologized inside. He kept them all. Dad never once said, “I saved your cards.” He barely said “I love you” unless alcohol had softened him. Yet there were thirty-two years of my handwriting beneath his bed. I read one from when I was twenty-one: “Sorry I can’t come home this year. Love you loads.” I do not even remember missing that birthday. He apparently did. My brother found his own box on the other side. Dad had made one for each of us. I spent years wishing he would become more expressive. Now I discover he had been storing affection quietly in shoeboxes where nobody could embarrass him by seeing it.