I opened the first letter in the trailer office of the scrap yard, with the heater ticking and Mr. Delgado standing at my elbow, and I knew from the first line that I was holding the great secret of my marriage. It was addressed in the careful hand of Stan. “Dear Joycie, if you are reading this, I am gone and the truck is gone, and I am sorry,” it began. “In 1969, in Da Nang, I knew a woman named Mai. In 1970, she had a daughter. I did not learn of her until 1974, two years after we were married.”
I read on with the paper trembling in my fingers. Stan had been twenty two, and frightened, and a long way from home. Mai had written to him through an Army chaplain. By the time the letter reached him, he was a husband in Valparaiso with a job at the mill, and he had no idea how to tell his wife. “I was afraid you would leave,” he wrote. “So I did the one thing I could. I sent money. Every month, for fifty years, under the name of a friend. I never met my daughter. Her name is Lan. She is in California. Forgive a stubborn old man.”
I sat in that trailer for a long time. I was angry, and I was hurt, and a little of me was grieving the fifty years he had carried it alone. But the picture lay under my hand, a young Stan in his Army uniform with a baby in the arms of a woman I would have liked. And the baby had his ears. I thought of every Christmas that man had stared out the window of our kitchen. Mr. Delgado drove me home through the dark, and neither of us said a word. When I came up the driveway, a red car stood at the curb. It was Cheryl.
A metal box found inside a truck door gave one widow the weekend to bring the daughter of her husband home to Valparaiso.
I laid the army green box on my kitchen table and put my hand on it. Cheryl stood by the stove with her coat still on and her purse held to her stomach. Tanner leaned in the doorway, looking at the floor. “I will say my terms once,” I said. “You will tell me about the last check. You will return the money to the account of your father. Tanner will go to the yard on Monday and ask Mr. Bud how to repair a door panel. And we will find Lan.” Cheryl went gray at the name. She sat down hard on the kitchen chair, as if someone had cut a string.
“Mom, I found the check in his coat,” Cheryl said, in a dry whisper. “Two thousand dollars, made out to Lan Tran. I thought it was a woman. I thought Dad had another life.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I was so angry that I cashed it at the check store in Merrillville with my own license. I wanted him to be the man I thought he was, and I wanted to punish him for being someone else.” She began to sob, bent over in her coat. “And then I sold his truck. For four hundred dollars. I did not even look inside.”
Tanner moved before any of us saw it coming. He took the metal box from the table with both hands and made for the back door, perhaps to throw it in the trash, perhaps to run, I do not know. He was eighteen, and ashamed, and a boy runs when he is ashamed. But Mr. Delgado, who had stayed to see me home, stood in the doorway with his arms spread wide, seventy four years old and as stubborn as a mule. “Young man,” he said gently. “That belongs to your grandmother.” Tanner stood there trembling. Then he set the box on the washing machine and sat on the floor.
I found Lan on the third day, through the credit union and a friend at the Veterans office. She was fifty five years old and taught fifth grade in San Jose. When I said who I was, there was a long silence on the telephone. “Mrs. Pietrowski,” she finally said, in a soft, careful voice. “My mother told me about a man who sent money. She told me never to ask who he was.” I told her he was her father. I told her his name was Stan, and that he had loved her every day, and that I had no right to keep her from him any longer. I heard her begin to cry.
Lan flew into Chicago on a Friday in October, in a gray coat, with a small suitcase and the ashes of her mother in her bag. I stood at the gate with Cheryl, who could hardly stand. Lan had the ears of Stan. She walked right up and took my hands in both of hers. “Thank you for finding me,” she said. Cheryl stepped forward, shaking, and began to speak, and Lan stopped her. “I know,” she said. “Mrs. Pietrowski told me. I think we have all been lonely a long time.” She put her arms around Cheryl, and the three of us stood together in the crowd.
In the name of my husband, Stan, who passed in 2022 and who carried a secret in a truck door for fifty years, I started the Door Panel Fund. It pays for translators, DNA tests and counseling for families of veterans in Porter, Lake and LaPorte counties who are trying to find children left behind overseas. In the first year, we helped nineteen families. A man of seventy six, in a Navy cap, laid a photograph on the desk and said, “I think I have a son in Okinawa.” I picked up the telephone, and I said, “Let us begin.”
In September, at the popcorn festival, I washed the truck. For the first time in thirty five years, I washed it, with a bucket and a sponge, in the driveway, and Lan stood beside me with a hose. The blue and white shone through the rust. When we were finished, I opened the driver door and she climbed up behind the wheel, and she sat there with her hands at ten and two, looking through the windshield at the street. “It has memories in it,” she said softly. “Joycie, that is what he said,” I told her. She laughed, and she started the engine.
