After dessert, I told Mom I wanted to get some of my old books out of the attic.
“Take whatever you want,” she said, not looking up from her phone. “Nobody goes up there anymore.”
I climbed the narrow stairs. The attic smelled like dust and old cardboard. My old bed was still there, with a bare mattress. Mom had turned the rest of the room into storage. Christmas decorations. Old lamps. Bins of my sisters’ trophies.
In the back corner, under the slanted part of the ceiling where I used to hit my head every morning, there was a plastic storage bin I didn’t recognize.
It had a piece of masking tape on the lid. In Mom’s handwriting, it said: DAD — MISC.
I opened it.
It was full of envelopes.
Hundreds of them. Neatly stacked in rubber-banded bundles. Every single one was addressed in Grandpa’s square handwriting.
