To understand the shock I felt that day, you have to know how much Frank meant to me.
When he first married my mother, I wanted nothing to do with him. I wouldn’t call him by his name, and I certainly wasn’t going to call him dad. If he asked me a question, I often pretended not to hear him.
My real father had disappeared when I was very young, so I already knew what it meant when an adult wasn’t there anymore.
Frank didn’t try to force things. He just kept showing up.
He learned how I liked my toast. He sat outside my bedroom during thunderstorms because I refused to let him come inside. He made pancakes every Sunday morning. And then one day, without thinking, I called him dad.
Neither of us ever brought it up afterward.
A few months later, my mother passed away abruptly from a brain aneurysm. I was just a kid, and suddenly everyone around me started wondering what would happen to me. My relatives were whispering about whether my aunt should take me in or if Frank would actually want to raise someone else’s child.
The night after the funeral, I hid under the kitchen table and I remember asking him if he was going to leave me, too.
“I won’t,” he said, “I promise.” And he did keep that promise until the very end.
He raised me. He walked me down the aisle when I got married. He was there when my daughter was born and treated her like she was the most important little person in the world.
Whenever I asked about his life before my mother, he never said much.
“The important part started when you came along,” he used to say.
So I never questioned it. Until that night.
The address he gave me at that hospital led me to a small house less than twenty minutes from the home where I’d grown up.
An older woman answered the door. The second she saw me, she knew who I was.
“Rosalie.”
I had never seen her before.
Her name was Caroline, and she told me Frank had called her a few weeks earlier. He had been very sick and apparently knew he might not have much time left. She invited me inside and I asked her what Frank had been hiding.
Instead of answering, she went into the kitchen and opened a drawer. Inside were cookie cutters. There was one shaped like a star and I stared at it because it looked exactly like the one Frank had used for my pancakes.
CONTINUE READING…>>
