I was twenty-three when I met Scott. He was twenty-six. He was a bartender at a place downtown called The Anchor, where my friends and I went on Friday nights. He had dark curly hair and a dimple in one cheek, and he made a little fuss over me every time I came in. Remembered my drink. Remembered my name. Wrote it on a napkin with a heart next to it.
He was fun. That was the thing about Scott. He was so much fun. Everything was an adventure. Road trips on a Tuesday. Concerts in other states. Cooking breakfast at two in the morning.
I got pregnant eight months after we met.
He was happy about it. He really was. At least at first. He cried when he saw the ultrasound. He bought a tiny Cleveland Browns onesie and hung it on the refrigerator. He talked to my stomach every night.
Ellie was born in October. On a rainy Tuesday morning. Seven pounds, two ounces. She had his dark curly hair. He held her in the hospital and said, “I’m going to be the best dad in the world. You’ll see.”
He wasn’t.
He wasn’t a bad man. I want to be fair about that. He never hit me. He never yelled at her. He just couldn’t stay.
He’d disappear for a weekend. Then a week. He’d come back with a sunburn and a story. A buddy needed help moving to Florida. A friend had tickets to a festival in Tennessee. He’d bring Ellie a stuffed animal from a gas station and act like he’d never left.
When Ellie was two, he lost his job at The Anchor. He said he was going to look for work in Columbus, two and a half hours away. He’d send money. He’d come home on weekends.
He came home twice.
The last time, Ellie was two and a half. He stayed for one night. He took her to the park and pushed her on the swings. He bought her an ice cream cone that she dropped on the sidewalk, and he bought her another one.
The next morning, he kissed her on the forehead while she was still asleep. He told me he’d be back in two weeks.
He never came back.
He didn’t call. He didn’t write. He changed his phone number. He sent forty dollars once, in an envelope with no return address, when Ellie was three. That was it. That was the only money I ever got from him.
I had to file for child support. The court found him once and garnished his wages for about four months. Then he quit that job, and nobody could find him again.
Ellie doesn’t remember him leaving. She was too little.
But she remembered that she was supposed to have a dad. Somewhere. Other kids at daycare had dads. Dads who picked them up and carried them on their shoulders.
And somehow, without anybody telling her, she decided he’d come back on her birthday.
Every year, on her birthday, she’d stand at our front window.
Starting when she was three. She’d drag a kitchen chair over to the window and climb up on it and stand there with her nose against the glass. Watching the street.
“What are you looking at, baby?” I’d ask.
“I’m waiting,” she’d say.
“For who?”
“For my daddy. It’s my birthday. He’ll come on my birthday.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know how to tell a three-year-old that her father wasn’t coming. That he’d forgotten. That he’d chosen not to.
So I didn’t say anything. I just let her stand there.
She stood at that window on her third birthday for two hours. On her fourth birthday, she stood there for most of the afternoon. She wouldn’t come away, even for cake. I had to bring the cake to the window.
He never came.
He never even called.
I met Patrick when Ellie was four.
He was a pharmacist at the CVS on Elm Street, where I picked up Ellie’s ear infection medicine. She had a lot of ear infections that year. I was in there every three weeks.
He was tall and a little awkward and wore glasses that always slid down his nose. He had a nervous laugh. He talked to Ellie every single time we came in. Not baby talk. Real talk. He asked her what she was going to name her stuffed rabbit. He asked her if she liked the bubblegum-flavored medicine or the grape. She said grape. He said grape was the correct answer.
The fifth time we came in, he gave her a lollipop from a jar he kept behind the counter for kids. Then he blushed bright red and said, “Would it be strange if I asked her mom out for coffee?”
I said, “A little.”
He looked crushed.
I said, “But yes.”
He didn’t try to be her father.
That’s the part I always come back to. He never once tried to replace Scott. He never said, I’m your dad now.He never pushed.
He just showed up.
Every single day.
He came to her preschool Thanksgiving play, when she was a turkey. She had one line. Gobble gobble, I’m thankful for my mom. She forgot it and just stood there and waved. Patrick filmed the whole thing and clapped like she’d won an Oscar.
He learned to braid her hair. I mean that literally. He watched YouTube videos. He practiced on a doll head he bought at a beauty supply store. He’d sit on the edge of the bathtub every morning before kindergarten and braid her hair while she sat on the closed toilet lid eating a waffle.
The braids were terrible. Lumpy. Lopsided. They started coming out by lunchtime.
She wore them every day anyway.
When Ellie was five and a half, Patrick and I got married. In my parents’ backyard, under a big oak tree, with forty guests and a potluck.
Ellie was the flower girl. She threw all her petals in a single pile at the beginning of the aisle and then walked the rest of the way swinging her empty basket.
During the vows, Patrick turned to Ellie too. He knelt down in front of her in the grass in his suit.
“I’m not going to try to be anybody else,” he said to her. “I’m just going to be Patrick. And I’m going to be here. Every day. Okay?”
She looked at him very seriously.
“Even on my birthday?” she said.
His face changed. He knew about the window. I’d told him.
“Especially on your birthday,” he said.
He kept that promise.
On her sixth birthday, she didn’t stand at the window.
I noticed it around two in the afternoon. She was in the backyard with Patrick, playing with the new sprinkler he’d bought her. Running through it in her bathing suit, screaming.
She hadn’t gone to the window at all.
I went into the bathroom and cried for ten minutes.
The first time she called him “Dad,” she was seven.
It wasn’t planned. It just slipped out. She was in the backseat of the car, and Patrick was driving, and she was trying to get his attention because she’d seen a horse in a field.
“Dad! Dad, look! A horse!”
The car went very quiet.
Patrick didn’t say anything. He just kept driving. But I looked over at him in the driver’s seat.
He was crying.
Not a lot. Just tears running down his face behind his glasses, while he kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.
“I see it, sweetheart,” he said. His voice was rough. “That’s a beautiful horse.”
He pulled over at the next gas station. He said he needed coffee. He went inside and stayed there for fifteen minutes.
When he came back, his eyes were red. He handed Ellie a candy bar.
“For spotting the horse,” he said.
There’s one more story I need to tell you about Patrick and Ellie. Because I think it explains who he was.
When Ellie was twelve, she got her first period.
It happened on a Saturday. I was at a work conference in Chicago. Two days. The first time I’d been away from her overnight in years.
She called Patrick from the bathroom, crying. Embarrassed. Scared.
Patrick had no idea what to do.
He told me later that he drove to three different stores. CVS, where he worked, first. Then Target. Then Walgreens. Because he stood in front of the shelves at CVS and couldn’t figure out which ones to buy. There were so many. Different sizes. Different kinds. Pads, tampons, liners. Different absorbencies. Wings or no wings.
He called his sister. His sister didn’t answer.
So he bought one of everything.
He came home with four bags. He set them all down on the bathroom counter in a big pile. He knocked on the door and told Ellie he’d left some things for her.
Then he went downstairs and made her a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate and put on her favorite movie and waited on the couch.
She came down an hour later. She sat next to him. She didn’t say anything about it. Neither did he.
He just put a blanket over her and handed her the hot chocolate.
When I got home the next day, she told me the whole story. She was laughing.
“Mom, he bought like forty boxes. Of everything. There are some in there for ladies over fifty.”
Then she stopped laughing.
“He was really nice about it, though,” she said quietly. “He didn’t make it weird.”
We had a son, Ben, when Ellie was eight. Ben is eight now. He’s obsessed with sharks and Legos and telling knock-knock jokes that don’t make any sense.
Patrick loved both of them exactly the same. I never once saw him treat Ellie differently. Not once. If anything, he was a little more careful with her. A little more gentle.
Because he knew.
He knew she’d stood at that window.
That was why the driving lessons didn’t worry me.
Not at first.
Ellie turned sixteen in October. She got her learner’s permit the week after her birthday. She’d studied for the test for a month. Flash cards on the kitchen counter. Patrick quizzing her at dinner.
“What do you do at a four-way stop?”
“The person who got there first goes first.”
“And if you both got there at the same time?”
“The person on the right goes first.”
“And if there’s a tie and nobody knows who’s on the right?”
“You wave at each other awkwardly until somebody gives up.”
“Correct,” Patrick said. “That’s actually in the manual.”
Patrick was the one who was going to teach her to drive.
That was always the plan. I’m a terrible driving teacher. I tried with my little sister once, years ago, and we didn’t speak for a week. I scream. I grab the dashboard. I press an imaginary brake on the floor of the passenger side.
Patrick is calm. Patient. He’s the kind of person who can watch you back into a mailbox and just say, “Okay. Let’s try that one more time.”
So every Friday, he’d jingle his car keys at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ready for another lesson, kiddo?”
And Ellie would come thundering down the stairs, grab her learner’s permit off the kitchen counter, and race outside.
At first, they practiced in the parking lot of the elementary school before dinner. Empty on Friday evenings. Patrick taught her to park between the lines. To back up straight. To use her turn signal, even when there was nobody around.
She’d come home pink-cheeked and excited.
“Mom, I parked between the lines! Twice! I only hit one cone!”
“You hit a cone?”
“It was a very small cone.”
Then, around the beginning of November, the lessons started happening more often.
Not just Fridays. Tuesdays. Wednesdays. Thursdays. Almost every night.
And they started going later. Much later.
At first they’d leave at seven and be back by eight-thirty. Then they’d leave at eight and be back at ten. Then they’d leave at nine.
Sometimes they didn’t come home until almost midnight.