When I was seven years old, I drew a picture of my family on the back of a church bulletin.
I drew my mother with yellow hair, because she’d dyed it that summer. I drew my father big and tall, the way he looked to me, with a brown hat on his head. I drew myself between them, holding both their hands. I drew a sun with a smiling face. I drew a little house with a chimney and smoke curling out.
Across the top, in purple crayon, I wrote: I LOVE MY FAMILY.
I gave it to my mother after the service. She looked at it for a second. She said, “That’s nice, Betty.” She folded it in half and put it in her purse.
That night, my father came home drunk. He knocked over the kitchen table. My mother’s purse fell on the floor and everything spilled out. Lipstick. Car keys. Cigarettes. My drawing.
He stepped on it on his way to the bedroom. I watched his boot come down right on top of the little house with the chimney.
The next morning, I found it in the trash can by the back door. With coffee grounds on it. And eggshells.
I didn’t take it out.
I was seven. But I already understood something. Some families are the kind you draw. And some families are the kind you have.
My mother left when I was nine. She went to Ohio with a man who sold farm equipment. She said she’d send for me. She didn’t.
My father drank until I was fourteen, and then the state took me away and put me with a foster family in Dayton. They were decent people. Strict. Tired. They had five foster kids and two of their own. Nobody hit me there. Nobody drew pictures either.
I aged out at eighteen with a garbage bag of clothes and a bus ticket.
And I made myself a promise. On the bus. Looking out the window at the cornfields going by.
Someday I’m going to have a family I’d want to draw.
I just didn’t know yet how long it would take.
My name is Betty Callahan. I’m sixty-one years old. I worked as a school cafeteria manager for twenty-six years in a little town in southern Indiana called Brookville. I know every kid’s name. I know which ones don’t have lunch money and need an extra roll slipped onto their tray. I know because I used to be one of them.
At nineteen, I made a mistake. His name was Wayne Duffy.
He was twenty-two and handsome and he drove a red Camaro with the windows down and the radio loud. He told me I was beautiful. Nobody had ever told me that. I married him three months later at the county courthouse in a dress I bought at a thrift store for eleven dollars.
He drank. Like my father. I should’ve seen it. I think part of me did. I think part of me thought I could fix it. That if I loved him hard enough, he’d stop.
I had our daughter, Natalie, when I was twenty.
For four years, I tried. He’d stop drinking for a month. Then he’d start again. He’d come home at two in the morning and break things. Plates. Lamps. The crib once, when Natalie was eight months old. She was sleeping in it. She woke up screaming. I took her out of it and held her in the bathroom with the door locked until the sun came up.
He never hit me. I want to say that because people always ask. He never hit me. He just broke everything around me. Over and over. Until there was nothing in that house that wasn’t cracked.
When Natalie was four, he came home one night and threw a beer bottle at the wall over her bed.
It missed her. It shattered on the wall six inches from her head. Glass in her hair. In her pillow.
I packed one bag that night. I put her in the car in her pajamas. And I drove to a women’s shelter in Columbus, Indiana, two hours away, and I never went back.
I met Rob Callahan a year later.
I was working at a diner in Columbus. The Blue Plate. I worked the breakfast shift so I could pick Natalie up from preschool at noon. Rob came in every morning at six-fifteen. He was a mechanic at a garage down the street. Thirty-one years old. Quiet. Broad shoulders. Grease under his fingernails that never came all the way out.
He ordered the same thing every single morning. Two eggs over easy. Wheat toast. Black coffee. He tipped twenty-five percent, which nobody did.
He didn’t say much. For three months, he just said, Morning, Betty, and Thank you, Betty, and Have a good one, Betty.
Then one morning, Natalie came in with me. Her preschool was closed for a teacher day. She sat in the corner booth with a coloring book while I worked.
Rob came in at six-fifteen. He sat at the counter. He saw her.
She was coloring a picture of a horse. She was trying very hard to stay in the lines. She was five. She kept going outside.
Rob picked up his coffee and walked over to her booth. He sat down across from her.
“That’s a fine horse,” he said.
Natalie looked up at him. Suspicious. She was suspicious of every man back then. She had good reason.
“It’s purple,” she said. “Horses aren’t purple.”
“Says who?” Rob said.
Natalie thought about it.
“Says everybody,” she said.
“Well, everybody’s wrong,” Rob said. “I’ve seen a purple horse.”
“Where?”
“In my dreams,” Rob said. “Every night. Big purple horse. Named Gus.”
Natalie stared at him. Then she laughed.
I was standing behind the counter holding a coffee pot. I’d never heard her laugh at a man before. Not once in five years.
He asked me out the next week. I said no. He asked again a month later. I said no. He asked a third time, and he said, “Betty, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll keep eating these eggs until you say yes.”
I said yes.
We got married two years later. In the backyard of his mother’s house. Natalie was seven. She wore a yellow dress and carried a basket of petals and threw them all at once in a big clump at the start of the aisle and then walked the rest of the way with an empty basket, very solemnly.
Rob adopted her when she was nine. He asked her first. Not me. Her.
He sat down across from her at our kitchen table and he said, “Nat, I want to ask you something important. You can say no. I’d understand.”
“What?” she said.
“Can I be your dad?” he said. “Officially. On paper. With a judge and everything.”
Natalie looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “You already are.”
He had to go out to the garage for twenty minutes after that.