After my grandfather passed away, his letters began to surface. My mother found a stack behind a row of books, tied together with fragile looking ribbon that must have been my grandmother's. They filled a tall green box in his closet where we'd expected to see the top hat he wore at his wedding. Fifteen bundled neatly in his desk were slipped in with paid bills and old photos of people who looked familiar, but who no one in our large extended family could quite recognize. The letters were all addressed to my grandmother: some to her parents' old farmhouse, some to an apartment in Chicago, many to the small house my grandparents shared as they built their family, child by child.

Some he had written from college, where he had gone after the war. The ones from his closet we sorted chronologically, and they mapped his days working sales across the Midwest. After all the rooms in my grandparents' condo were cleaned, organized, sorted through, the aunts and female cousins, all ten of us, retreated to the bedroom. The boys, as we called them, tiptoed between the fridge stocked with Bud and the kitchen table, maybe afraid to stray too far. My mother and her sisters read the letters while lying on their stomachs, draped across what had been their parents' bed. My cousins and I watched our mothers kicking their legs like teenagers, smiling and weeping, passing the envelopes to each other then down to us as we sat, expectant as puppies, on the bedroom floor.

"This is the truest kind of history. This is what you girls have to live up to. Listen," she said. "Darling, I can't tell you how much I love and miss you-- look how long and frequent my letters have been." She read sentences, then paragraphs, out loud and her voice was clear and strong, everything the eldest daughter's should be. Her sisters, then all of us cousins, would pause as she spoke, and only my sister and I wondered how my mother was keeping it together. I wondered if it was the shots of whiskey the aunts had taken beforehand that had calmed my mother. I wondered if that was why the four of them entwined looked like one strange, beautiful creature, something from mythology, unconscious of its own body, living on an island and waiting for men to sail up in their golden boats. And my grandfather's words, the darling and the always that so delicately slipped into almost every sentence, they were all that tied my aunts to the past, to that secret time, to that place where they knew everything.

"I'd love for you to make me a pair of socks, hon. I'd cherish them," my mother read. "This was after I was born, but before the rest of you," she said as she wrapped an arm around the sister closest to her. She handed me the letter, and immediately began reading another. My grandfather's writing had a long slant that he'd passed down to each of his children, especially my mom. On the margins of the letter, I read the little notes, an I miss you, an I love you, phrases that in any other context I would scoff at, doubt, ponder the sincerity of before writing them off completely. But here, here they meant everything.

"Well my love, think of me always, and thinking of me, love me always, as I do you." My mother breathed in, held it, then handed the pages to her youngest sister, who was crying.

"Love letters," she said. "All of them."

I don't remember anyone speaking much after that. My leg had fallen asleep, and I leaned against my sister, suddenly weary with the truth of who and where we were. My mother and her sisters had become orphans in the peculiar way that only adults can. My grandmother had been in the ground, somewhere in Indiana, for almost ten years. And the box holding my grandfather's ashes, the one whose too-small size I took as an insult, sat on the coffee table in the living room. The boys played poker in the kitchen, and I heard the crack of a beer being opened, then another. This is the truth, I thought, all we have left of it.