When she looked me dead in the eyes and whispered, “Don’t leave again, Stefan,” I froze. Stefan was my dad. He left us when I was nine.
I moved in after her second fall in the kitchen. No one else in the family stepped up. My aunt claimed she was “too far,” my cousin said it would “mess with his work-life balance.” So it was me and her. We ate boiled potatoes and watched reruns of old Czech soap operas. Some nights she was sharp—reminiscing about Prague and how she made her own yeast—but other times she’d forget where she was, or why she had a bruise on her hip.
At first, I thought calling me Stefan was just another memory slip. But she started doing it only when we were alone. And not casually. Intimately. “You always loved cream in your coffee, Stefánek,” she’d say, setting down my mug. Or, “You used to hum that song to your baby.”
I didn’t correct her. I was scared to. What if it wasn’t confusion? What if my dad had come back once, years ago, and none of us knew?
One night I found her sitting up in bed, gripping an old photo like a relic. “He came back once,” she whispered. “You were sleeping. He said you’d be better off thinking he was gone for good.”
And then she reached into her nightstand, pulled out—an envelope. Yellowed, thick, sealed with what looked like wax. No name on the front. Just one word, written in a hurried scrawl: “Later.”
She looked at it for a long time before pressing it into my hands. “He left this for you,” she said, her voice thinning like smoke. “Said I should give it to you… only if you ever asked.”
“I didn’t ask,” I said, unsure why I felt guilty.
“You wanted to know,” she replied, closing her eyes.
I stared at that envelope all night. I didn’t open it. Not then. I tucked it in my jacket pocket and told myself I’d wait for the right moment. That moment didn’t come for another three weeks—after a phone call I wasn’t expecting.
My cousin Marko—yes, the same one who said helping Grandma would ruin his work-life balance—called to say he was dropping by. “Thought I’d see how Babka’s doing,” he said casually, like he hadn’t been silent for months.
He showed up with a box of pastries and a weird nervous energy. I watched him make a show of fluffing her pillows, asking if she remembered him. She looked at him blankly, then turned to me and said, “Stefan, tell the boy I’m tired.”
Marko’s smile twitched. “Did she just call you…?”