“Over the Rainbow,” he whispered.
My scissors stopped.
That was the song.
Exactly.
“How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer.
I finished the last section of hair.
Then suddenly Ray began crying.
Not quietly.
His whole body shook.
I put down the scissors.
“Ray?”
He turned toward me.
“Your mother asked me never to contact you.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“What?”
“But I don’t have much time left.”
His voice cracked.
“And I couldn’t leave this world without seeing you once.”
I could barely breathe.
“Do we know each other?”
Ray reached inside his jacket.
His fingers shook as he pulled out an old yellowed envelope.
“I’ve been looking for you for years.”
He held it toward me.
On the front, written in faded blue ink, were words I recognized instantly.
**For Lucy. When he’s earned it.**
It was my mother’s handwriting.
“Where did you get this?”
“She gave it to me.”
“When?”
“Two months before she died.”
I stepped backward.
“No.”
Ray lowered his head.
“She came to see me at the correctional facility in Huntsville.”
I stared at him.
“She told me she was dying.”
His voice shook.
“She told me about you. That you were funny. That you became a hairdresser.”
He looked at his hands.
“That you had my hands.”
My heart started pounding.
“She gave me this envelope and told me I could find you only if I stayed clean.”
He swallowed.
“I’ve been clean nine years.”
Then he looked directly at me.
“I think you deserve to know who I am.”
At that moment, Brenda came out of her office.
She saw Ray crying.
“Is he bothering you?”
“No.”
“What’s happening?”
I looked at Ray.
At the bluebird tattoo.
At my mother’s envelope.
Then I said something I never imagined I would say.
“I think he might be my father.”
Brenda went silent.
Then, unexpectedly, she flipped the salon sign to CLOSED.
“Take all the time you need.”
I sat down.
“Tell me everything.”
So Ray did.
He met my mother, June, when they were nineteen.
She worked at a snow-cone stand in Galveston.
He worked on a fishing boat.
For three weeks, he bought a cherry snow cone every day because he was too shy to ask her out.
Finally, she said,
“Are you going to keep buying snow cones, or are you going to ask my name?”
They were together for four years.
On her twentieth birthday, they got matching bluebird tattoos.
“Why bluebirds?” I asked.
Ray smiled faintly.
“Because of the song.”
He looked at the tattoo.
“Your mother said bluebirds were for people who would make it over the rainbow someday.”
His smile disappeared.
“I was the one who didn’t make it.”
When Ray was twenty-two, he injured his back at work.
He was prescribed pain medication.
Then the prescription ended.
His dependence didn’t.
He started making worse choices.
My mother became pregnant.
She told him to get clean or leave.
He tried.
Again and again.
But he kept relapsing.
I was born in April.
Ray was there.
He held me.
Promised he would change.
Four months later, he robbed a convenience store.
He was sentenced to fifteen years.
My mother visited him once with me.
Then she left.
She told him she would raise me without him.
“She was right,” Ray said.
“I would’ve broken your heart over and over.”
After years in prison, Ray finally entered a serious recovery program.
He got clean.
Stayed clean.
Then, shortly before my mother died, she found him.
She visited him in prison.
And gave him the envelope.
“She told me, ‘Lucy deserves to know where she came from. But only if you stay clean. Not for me. Not for her. For yourself.’”
Ray looked at the envelope in my lap.
“She told me to wait five years after I got out.”
I stared at him.
“And you did?”
“I waited.”
Then he raised his tattooed wrist.
“Some nights that envelope was the only thing keeping me from giving up.”
