My Stepfather Threw Out My Dead Father’s Record Collection When I Was 12. Twenty-Two Years Later A Record Store Called: Someone Had Found A Letter Inside One Of The Sleeves

My father kept his records in the basement because my mother said the living room was for living.

He didn’t mind. He built the den himself, in 1995, out of a corner of the basement of our house on Lydia Street in Greenfield: two walls of paneling, a square of orange carpet remnant from the Carpet Barn on Route 51, a brown plaid couch somebody on our street had put out for the garbage men, and shelves. Shelves along the whole back wall, pine boards on cinder blocks, and on the shelves, four hundred and eleven records in alphabetical order by last name of artist, which he told me was the only correct way and anyone who did it differently was “a person you can’t trust with a lawnmower.”

His name was Ray Dolan. He worked at the Edgar Thomson plant in Braddock, on the blast furnace, for twenty-two years. He was a big man, six-three and heavy through the shoulders, with a dark beard that started going grey when I was six and a Steelers T-shirt for every day of the week, some of them older than I was.

I was his only child. I was born in December of 1991, red hair and freckles like his mother, and from the time I could walk the ritual was the same. He’d come home from shift, shower, come down the basement stairs in his socks, and say, “Meg. Pick one.”

I’d pick. I’d pull a record off the shelf by the top edge, the way he taught me, and hand it to him. He’d slide it out of the sleeve with his big hands so careful you’d think it was a baby bird, and set it on the turntable, a silver Technics he’d bought in 1983 and would not let my mother dust, and drop the needle.

Then we’d sit on the plaid couch and listen to side one.

That was the rule. Side one all the way through, no talking, no skipping. Then he’d ask me what I thought.

“It was okay,” I’d say, when I was five.

“Okay,” he’d say. “Okay. Well, the man spent a year of his life on that, Meg, so let’s give him a little better than okay.”

What He Wrote Inside

Here is the thing about my father’s records that I didn’t understand until I was grown. He wrote in them.

Not on the covers. Inside. On the paper inner sleeve, in the top corner, in blue ballpoint, in the small square handwriting of a man who’d learned to write on a furnace log. Every record had a note. The date he bought it, where, what it cost, and sometimes a line about what was happening that day.

Jerry’s Records, Squirrel Hill, 3/14/88, $4. Bought the day I asked Linda to marry me. She said yes. Celebrated with this.

National Record Mart, Monroeville, 12/9/91, $7.99. Meg is 6 days old and she has a lot to say about it.

Eide’s, downtown, 6/9/96. Took Meg. She picked this one off the dollar rack because she liked the horse on the cover. Turns out it’s good. The kid has ears.

I knew he wrote in them. I used to watch him do it, bent over the sleeve on the arm of the couch with his tongue between his teeth. I just didn’t read them. I was a kid. They were his.

“What are you writing, Dad?”

“Just the date. So I remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Whatever I’m going to forget.”

My favorite was an album with a blue cover and a man’s face on it, half in shadow. I liked it because there was a saxophone on it, and because I liked the way the two words of the title sounded together when I said them. Moondance. I’d say it over and over until my father told me to give it a rest. He said I’d worn out his first copy by the time I was eight and he’d had to buy a second one at Jerry’s.

I’d lie on the orange carpet with my head on a couch cushion and my feet up on the cinder blocks and the ceiling would go gold from the lamp, and my father would sit with his big arms spread across the back of the couch and his eyes closed, and at the end of side one he’d open them and look at me and say, “Well?”

March 2003

He died on a Tuesday. March 11, 2003. He was forty-one.

He collapsed at the plant, at the end of his shift, walking to his truck. The man who was with him, a guy named Pauly Sabo who’d worked next to him for fifteen years, said he’d been talking about the Penguins one second and then he was on the ground. Heart. Nobody knew. He’d never been to a doctor in his life except for the plant physical.

I was eleven. I was in sixth grade at St. Rosalia and I got called down to the office at two-fifteen, and my mother was standing there in her work clothes from the dentist’s office with a face I’d never seen on her before.

I’m not going to tell you about the funeral. Everybody has one of those.

I’ll tell you about the basement. For a month after, nobody went down there. My mother couldn’t. I’d stand at the top of the stairs with my hand on the rail and look down into the dark where the lamp wasn’t on, and I couldn’t make my feet go.

Then one night in April I went down. I turned on the lamp. I pulled a record off the shelf by the top edge and I slid it out so careful you’d think it was a baby bird and I put it on the Technics and I dropped the needle, and it was the one with the blue cover, and the saxophone started, and I sat on the plaid couch and I listened to side one all the way through, no talking, no skipping.

At the end I said, out loud, to nobody, “It was good, Dad.”

My mother found me asleep on the couch at midnight. She didn’t say anything. She just put the afghan over me and turned off the lamp.

Doug

My mother met Doug Pasternak in January of 2004, ten months after. He did HVAC. He’d come to fix the furnace, which had been making a noise all winter that my father would have fixed in an afternoon.

He was thirty-nine and divorced and he had a laugh that was too big for our kitchen. He was not a bad man. I want to say that early, because I’m going to say some bad things, and I’ve had twenty-two years to think about which ones are fair.

He was in the house by March. By June my mother was pregnant. She sat me down on the back steps and told me and she cried and I didn’t, and she said, “Meg, I know. I know. But I’m thirty-eight and I’m not going to get another chance at this, and I need you to be happy for me, or at least to try.”

I was twelve. I said I’d try.

They got married in August at the courthouse. Doug moved his stuff in. He was a man who took up room. His tools went in the basement, in the corner opposite my father’s den, and I’d come down to play a record and find a shop vac on the orange carpet.

“Sorry, kiddo,” he said once, dragging it off. “Didn’t know this was a no-fly zone.”

“It’s my dad’s.”

“I know it is. I know. I’ll keep my stuff over there.”

He did, for a while. That was the thing about Doug. He’d say the right thing and mean it, and then a month later it was like the conversation had never happened.

In September the basement took water. Half of Pittsburgh took water that month, after the hurricane came up the valley. We got four inches across the whole floor, and the bottom shelf of my father’s records sat in it for two days before anybody could get the pump going.

We lost about sixty. Warped, the covers gone to pulp. I stood in the basement in rubber boots and pulled them off the bottom shelf one at a time and tried to read what he’d written inside, and the ink had run, and I cried in a way I hadn’t at the funeral.

Doug carried the rest upstairs. Three hundred and fifty records, in eleven boxes, into the little room at the end of the hall that had been my father’s office. He didn’t have to. He did it himself, eleven trips up the stairs, and he stacked them neatly and he said, “They’ll be safe up here, kiddo. Dry.”

I believed him.

The Empty Room

November 16, 2004. A Tuesday. I was in seventh grade and I had a dentist appointment after school at my mother’s office, and she drove me home at five, and the first thing I noticed when I came in the kitchen door was that the house smelled like fresh paint.

“What’s that smell?”

My mother didn’t answer right away. She put her purse down very carefully.

“Doug did some work today.”

I went down the hall.

The door to my father’s office was open. The walls were yellow. Not the beige they’d been that morning. Yellow, a soft pale yellow, two coats, still tacky in the corners. There was a box in the middle of the floor with a picture of a crib on it.

And the shelves were empty. The eleven boxes were gone.

I didn’t understand at first. I thought he’d moved them. I went down to the basement and the den was the way it had been, the plaid couch and the Technics and the empty back wall, and no boxes. I checked the garage. I checked the hall closet. I checked under the stairs. I was still checking when Doug’s truck pulled in.

He came in the kitchen door in his work boots with paint on his hands and he saw my face and he knew. I’ll give him that. He knew right away.

“Where are my dad’s records.”

“Meg —”

“Where are they.”

He looked at my mother. My mother looked at the floor.

“I took them out to the landfill in Monroeville this morning,” he said. “Kiddo. We needed the room. The baby’s coming in February and that was the only —”

I don’t remember what I said. My mother says I screamed. I remember my mother saying my name over and over, and I remember Doug standing very still in the kitchen with his hands held out from his sides like a man showing he’s not armed, and I remember going down the basement stairs.

The Technics was on the shelf where it had always been. He hadn’t taken that. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought it was worth something. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten to it.

I unplugged it. It weighed about as much as I did. I carried it up two flights of stairs with my arms shaking and I put it under my bed, against the wall, and I pushed my winter clothes in front of it, and I sat on the bed with my back against the headboard until it got dark.

Nobody came up. I think they were afraid to.

Twenty-Two Years

I’m thirty-four now. I’m a respiratory therapist at a hospital in Oakland. I’m married to a good man named Chris, who sells restaurant equipment and who knew about the Technics before he knew my middle name. We have a daughter, Nora. She’s four. She has the red hair.

The turntable has lived under every bed I’ve ever had. The dorm at Pitt. The apartment in Bloomfield with the radiator that screamed. The duplex in Dormont. The house we bought in Brookline in 2021. It’s in the living room now, on a shelf Chris built, because my mother was wrong about living rooms.

I have eleven records. I bought them one at a time, over twenty years, when I could stand to. Not his. Copies. Jerry’s Records is still there in Squirrel Hill, and the first time I walked in, at nineteen, I had to walk back out and sit on the curb on Murray Avenue for twenty minutes before I could go in again.

I never bought the one with the blue cover. I’d pick it up and put it back. I couldn’t tell you why. It felt like buying a photograph of somebody else’s father.

My half-brother Tyler was born in February of 2005. He’s twenty-one. He’s a good kid and none of it is his fault and I’ve never once let him think it was. He plays bass in a band that’s terrible and I go to every show.

Doug and I are civil. That’s the word. We’ve been civil for twenty-two years. He comes to Nora’s birthday. He brought a cake last year and sat in the corner of our living room with a paper plate, and I watched him look at the Technics on the shelf, and look away.

My mother told me once, when I was in college, that he’d tried to apologize to me a hundred times and couldn’t find the way in.

“He could start with ‘I’m sorry,'” I said.

“He’s not that kind of man, Meg.”

“Then I’m not that kind of daughter.”

The Call

It was a Tuesday. March 10, 2026. I was in the break room on the fourth floor eating a yogurt and my phone rang with a number I didn’t know, a 412, and I almost let it go.

“Is this Megan Dolan?”

“It’s Megan Harlan now. It was Dolan.”

“Was your father Raymond Dolan? Ray? Lived on Lydia Street in Greenfield?”

I put the yogurt down.

“Who is this?”

“My name’s Terry Kowalczyk. I own a record store on Butler Street, in Lawrenceville. Spin Cycle Records. I’m sorry to call you out of the blue. I found you through the Greenfield neighborhood page on Facebook. Somebody there knew your cousin. I’ve got something here I think belongs to you.”

“What kind of something.”

“It’s a letter. It was inside a record sleeve. It’s addressed — hang on, let me read it to you exactly. It says, on the outside, To Meg, when you’re old enough to want these.“

I didn’t say anything.

“Ma’am?”

“What record.”

“It’s Van Morrison. Moondance. There’s a note in the corner of the inner sleeve too, same handwriting. It says, Jerry’s, 1/20/00, $6. Second copy. Meg wore out the first one. Keeping this one in the plastic till she’s older. And the letter was folded in there behind the inner sleeve, where you wouldn’t see it unless you took the whole thing apart.”

I was standing up. I don’t remember standing up.

“Mr. Kowalczyk. Where did you get that record.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling instead of just mailing it. I’ve got about sixty more. All with the same handwriting inside. And I think you’re going to want to hear where they came from.”

Butler Street

I left work. I told my charge nurse there was a family thing and I didn’t explain, and she looked at my face and said go.

It takes twenty-five minutes to get from Oakland to Lawrenceville in the middle of the day. I don’t remember the drive. I remember parking on a side street off Butler and sitting in the car with my hands on the wheel, and I remember thinking, very clearly, you are thirty-four years old, you have a four-year-old and a mortgage and a job where you keep people breathing, and you are about to cry in a record store.

Spin Cycle is a narrow storefront between a coffee place and a tattoo shop. Bins down both walls. A cat asleep on the counter. Terry Kowalczyk was a man of about sixty with a grey ponytail and reading glasses on a cord, and when I came in he looked up and knew who I was.

“Megan.”

“Yes.”

“Come on back.”

He had a table in the back room with a lamp, and on the table, in a wooden crate, were records. He’d pulled them. Sixty-one, he said. He’d gone through every one in the lot, every sleeve, looking for the handwriting, and he’d set aside every one that had it.

And on top, in its plastic, the blue cover. A man’s face, half in shadow.

“I didn’t open the letter,” Terry said. “I read the outside and I put it back. It’s yours.”

I sat down in his chair. I picked up the record by the top edge, the way I was taught, and I slid out the inner sleeve so careful you’d think it was a baby bird, and there in the corner, in blue ballpoint, in square small handwriting:

Jerry’s, 1/20/00, $6. Second copy. Meg wore out the first one. Keeping this one in the plastic till she’s older.

I turned the inner sleeve over, and there it was. An envelope, the small kind, folded once. To Meg, when you’re old enough to want these.

The cat came in and got up on the table and lay down on the crate. Terry said, “I’ll be out front,” and left me there.

The Letter

I’m going to tell you some of what it said. Not all of it. The rest is mine and Nora’s.

It was dated January 20, 2000. I was eight. He’d written it the night he bought the second copy, on a sheet of the lined paper he kept in the kitchen drawer for grocery lists, in the same square handwriting, and it was two pages.

Meg —

You’re eight and you’re asleep upstairs and you wore out my Moondance. I’m not mad. I’m writing this down because I’m 38 and I work on a furnace and my dad died at 52, and your mother says I’m morbid, and maybe I am, but I’d rather be morbid and write it down than not.

These records are going to be yours. Every one of them. Your mother doesn’t care about them and that’s fine, she has other things, but you’ve got ears, Meg. I knew when you picked the horse one off the dollar rack. You can’t teach that.

Here’s what I want you to know. I wrote in all of them. The dates, what was going on. I did that because I figured someday you’d be older than me, which is a strange thing to think about your kid, and you’d pull one down and read the corner and you’d know what I was doing that day. Where I was. That I was thinking about you. Most of them say something about you. Go look.

Side one all the way through. No skipping. Then tell me what you thought. I’ll hear you.

— Dad

P.S. The Technics is yours too. Don’t let anybody dust it.

I sat in the back room of a record store in Lawrenceville with a cat on the crate and I read it four times and then I put my head down on the table.

After a while Terry came to the doorway. “You want a glass of water?”

“No,” I said. “I want to know where they’ve been.”

Where They Came From

Terry told me the rest when I could hear it.

In 2004 there’d been a man named Gene Pastorek who worked the gate at the landfill in Monroeville. He’d worked there twenty-six years. He was a collector. Everybody who worked with him knew it, Terry said. Gene would see a load come in with anything that looked like it had been loved — records, radios, old cameras — and he’d pull it off the pile before the compactor got it, and take it home to a garage in Plum that his wife said she’d never once been able to park in.

On a Tuesday in November of 2004, a man in an HVAC truck had come in with eleven boxes of records, and Gene had seen them from the booth. The man hadn’t even gotten them all the way to the pile. Gene had walked out, Terry said, and told him to set them by the booth, that he’d take care of them.

“Gene told his son that story,” Terry said. “Said the guy looked like he wanted to be sick. Said he was glad to hand them over. He thanked Gene. Gene thought that was a strange thing, a man thanking you for taking his trash.”

Gene Pastorek died in December of 2025. He was seventy-nine. His son and daughter had cleaned out the garage in Plum, and there’d been nine thousand records in it, and they’d called every store in the city, and Terry had bought a van-load for a flat price because that’s how it’s done.

He’d been going through them for two months. Pricing, cleaning, sorting. He’d gotten to the Ms in February. He’d opened Moondance to check the vinyl and the letter had fallen out on his counter.

“I’ve been doing this thirty-one years,” he said. “People write in sleeves. You see it. Phone numbers, names. I’ve never seen anybody write to somebody in one. And then I started pulling the others, and they all had the same hand, and most of them said Meg.”

He’d pulled sixty-one. He thought there were more in the boxes he hadn’t gotten to. He’d keep looking.

“What do I owe you,” I said.

“You owe me the story,” Terry said. “When it’s done. That’s all.”

What Doug Said

I called him from the car. Not my mother. Him.

He picked up on the second ring, which he never does. “Meg? Everything okay? Is it Nora?”

“Nora’s fine. I’m in Lawrenceville. I’m sitting outside a record store with sixty-one of my father’s records in my back seat.”

The silence was so long I checked to see if the call had dropped.

“That’s not possible,” he said finally.

“A man at the landfill pulled them off the pile. He kept them in his garage for twenty-one years. His kids sold them when he died. There was a letter in one. From my dad. To me.”

I heard him breathe. I heard him sit down on something.

“Doug. I need you to tell me what happened that day. The real thing. Not ‘we needed the room.'”

And he told me. He was crying, which I’d never heard him do in twenty-two years, and he told me.

He’d been broke. Not short. Broke. The divorce had taken everything and the HVAC work had dried up that fall and he’d moved into our house with four hundred dollars in his account and a truck payment two months behind. My mother was five months pregnant and scared, and she’d asked him — she’d asked him, Meg — to make room for the crib, because the office was the only room and the records were the only thing in it. He’d called two record stores. One had offered him forty dollars for the lot. He’d hung up on them. He couldn’t afford a storage unit. He couldn’t afford anything.

“I stood in that room for an hour,” he said. “I’m not telling you this to get out of it. I’m telling you because you asked. I stood there and I thought, I can’t sell this man’s life for forty dollars, and I can’t keep it, and I’ve got a woman upstairs who needs a nursery, and I did the one thing I could think of and it was the wrong thing. I knew it was the wrong thing when the guy at the gate came out. He looked at me like he knew. He said he’d take care of them. I said thank you. I drove home and painted the room, and I have thought about your face in that kitchen every single day for twenty-two years, and I never had the — I never —”

“You never said sorry.”

“I’m saying it. I’m sorry, Meg. I’m so sorry. I threw away your father.”

I sat in the car on a side street in Lawrenceville with the letter in my lap.

“You didn’t, though,” I said. “It turns out.”

Side One, Again

I didn’t play it that night. I waited for Saturday.

Saturday morning Chris took Nora to the park so I could clean the Technics, which I’d never let anybody dust, and I cleaned it the way the man at Jerry’s had showed me years ago, and I put on a new belt that I’d bought in 2019 and never had the heart to install. I set the crate of records on the floor next to the shelf.

When they came back, Nora had a stick and a scraped knee and a lot to say about both. I let her say it. Then I sat down on the couch and I said, “Nora. Come here. Pick one.”

She looked at the crate. She’s four. She pulled one out by the middle, and I showed her the top edge, and she tried again.

She picked the blue one. Of course she did. I’d put it in front. I’m not a saint.

I slid it out so careful you’d think it was a baby bird, and I showed her the corner of the sleeve, the blue ballpoint, the square small hand, and I said, “That’s your grandpa’s writing. He wrote that when I was eight.”

“What’s it say?”

“It says he was keeping this one for me till I was older.”

“Are you older?”

“I’m older.”

I set it on the Technics. I dropped the needle. The saxophone started. Nora sat on the floor with her head on a couch cushion and her feet up on the shelf Chris built, and the afternoon light came in across the floor and went gold, and I sat on the couch with my arms spread along the back and I closed my eyes.

Side one all the way through. No talking. No skipping.

At the end, the needle lifted, and the room was quiet, and Nora looked up at me from the floor with her red hair all over the cushion and said, “Well?”

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