Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 3

Love, Bill: Finding My Father through Letters from World War II by Jan Krulick-Belin

Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 3:

Queens, New York
Spring 1960

“Daddy, where are you going?” I whispered while standing in the
doorway of the bedroom I shared with my two older brothers.
I somehow knew that this conversation required hushed tones
and would hold a very deep secret that only the two of us would
share. I certainly couldn’t have known back then that there would be
more secrets to come.

It was very early in the morning, that moment when night transitions
to a new day and everything is still cloaked in a velvet silence.
The casement window in our bedroom had been cranked open just
enough to welcome in the heady scent of newly mowed grass mingled
with my mother’s lilac bushes blooming below. My father was
carefully closing the door to my parents’ adjacent bedroom. His back
was toward me; one hand was still on the doorknob, and the other
rested tenderly against the door, as if he were holding back what was
on the other side. Startled, he turned around. He had been caught
like a thief whose clean getaway had been foiled. For a moment, we
both stood frozen in the tiny second-floor vestibule, surrounded by
the four doors that led to the two bedrooms, the linen closet, and the
bathroom.