MargenMy father kept every receipt of his life in shoeboxes. Electricity bills, cinema tickets, market slips with the names of tomatoes that no longer exist. When he died, he asked me not to throw them out without reading them. I thought it was the last quirk of a man who sorted his drawers by colour.
It took me four months to open the first box. I opened it on a sleepless night, promising myself I would throw the lot out in the morning. I started with 1994. A petrol receipt, a chemist's, a bunch of flowers for twelve euros. And so, box after box, I went on rebuilding a man I thought I knew.
Then I found the pattern. The first Friday of every month, for twenty-two years, the same amount at the same florist's. He never brought them home. My mother has been dead since before I was born; he never mentioned her again, not once, as if silence were a form of loyalty.
I went looking for the florist's. It was still open. The woman behind the counter, elderly now, recognised my surname before I had finished saying it. She told me my father bought the flowers and left them, always, on the same bench in the cemetery. That sometimes he sat there for an hour. That he never spoke.
"And what flowers were they?" I asked, for something to say, because my voice was shaking.
"Forget-me-nots," she said. "Always forget-me-nots. He said they were the only thing he knew how to ask for without getting it wrong."
I went home with the 2015 box under my arm. That night I threw nothing away. Now I am the one who keeps them, in the same shoeboxes, and on the first Friday of every month I go down to the market and buy tomatoes that no longer exist. It is the only thing I know how to ask for without getting it wrong.