One morning, nearly three months after he married my mother, I wandered into the kitchen and called him Dad without thinking.
He dropped the spatula.
Neither of us mentioned it.
He simply placed the least-burned pancake on my plate.
I wandered into the kitchen and called him Dad without thinking.
My mother died five months later.
A brain aneurysm took her so quickly that the last conversation I remembered having with her was about whether I had put my shoes away.
The house was filled with relatives.
They whispered in hallways and looked at Frank when they thought I was not watching.
My mother died five months later.
“He isn’t her real father.”
“Her aunt could take her.”
“He’ll want to start over.”
I spent the night after the funeral sitting beneath the kitchen table with my knees pulled against my chest.
Frank found me there shortly before sunrise.
He lowered himself onto the floor without asking why I was hiding.
“He’ll want to start over.”
“Are you leaving?” I whispered.
He looked as though I had struck him.
“No.”
“Everybody leaves.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
Frank reached beneath the table and held out his little finger.
“I promise.”
He kept it.
“Are you leaving?”
***
Years later, he walked me down the aisle.
At my daughter’s christening, he stood beside me with one hand beneath her head, afraid I might drop her even though I was 32.
Whenever I asked about his life before my mother, he gave the same answer.
“The important part started when you came along, sweetheart.”
I always heard devotion in those words.
I never heard what he was leaving out.
Years later, he walked me down the aisle.
Frank’s health began failing shortly after his 78th birthday.
First came the exhaustion.
Then the weight loss.
