She read it in the parking lot of the Sonic on Prairie Avenue, because she could not read it at home with Gaby there and she could not read it at the curb in front of her parents' house, and because the Sonic had bright lights and nobody looked at anybody. She ordered a cherry limeade so the carhop would leave her alone, and she put the one-armed doll on the dashboard, facing her, and she took the letter out of the envelope.
Two sheets of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, the ragged edges trimmed off with scissors. Blue ballpoint, pressed so hard that the words stood up from the back of the page like Braille.
To whoever she is now,
I don't know what they call you. I asked the lady at the county not to tell me back then and I'm not going to ask now. So I'm going to call you the only name I've got, which is the name you gave yourself, which was Daffy, because you couldn't say Daphne when you came to me and by the time you could you didn't want to. You were a duck for most of 2008. I'm sorry if that's embarrassing.
My name is Elam Caskey. I'm your mother's father. You lived with me for eleven months when you were three, in the apartment over my shop on Northern Avenue in Pueblo, Colorado. You probably don't remember it. The people at the county said kids that age mostly don't, and I hoped they were right, and that's the first thing I need to tell you, because it's the worst one. I hoped you'd forget me. I worked at it. I cut myself out of every picture I gave the county to give to you. I sat at my kitchen table with a pair of scissors and a magnifying glass and I did it as careful as I've ever done anything. I couldn't get my arm out of one of them without cutting you in half, so I left it. I figured you'd never know whose arm it was.
I did that because in 2008 I found out I was going to die of my liver. They gave me about five years. I thought the kindest thing I could do for you was to make sure that when I went, you'd already be somewhere else, with people who'd be around to see you graduate, and that you wouldn't have to lose me, because you'd never have had me. I asked the county to find a family for you and I signed a paper that said I was not a permanency resource. That's what they call it. I looked it up after. It means a person a child can't count on to stay.