Love lettering on a forearm

Dad's van is still in the yard behind the chapel, the signwriting on its side bleached to ghosts by three summers. I went through his tins on Sunday. Every brush was wrapped in newspaper from the year you left, and the pots of enamel had set hard as toffee. Under the bench I found his practice sheets, pages and pages of the same two words in one thin, even hand, the L standing tall and the e closed off with a neat little hook. Then the same word again with a full stop after it, and never once a stop after anything else.

Mrs Okafor from the post office says he lettered half the shopfronts on Market Street and would never paint a sign that promised more than the shop could deliver. I told her that sounded like him. She said he once turned down the bakery because they wanted 'Fresh Bread Daily Daily Daily', and he said a bakery didn't need shouting at.

I took one of the sheets home and tried the strokes with a ruler and a fine nib. My hand shook on the o. It shook on the v. By the end I had something that looked, from across the kitchen, like his.

I'm posting this in the envelope with the stamp you licked wrong at fourteen. Keep it somewhere dry. I still don't know why he stopped there, and I don't think I'm meant to. Maybe that was the whole point of him, saying one true thing and leaving the rest of the page white.

Love, Ruth