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.
“Why so late?” I asked Patrick one night. They’d just come in. It was eleven-forty. Ellie had gone straight upstairs without saying good night.
Patrick was hanging his keys on the hook by the door.
“Less traffic,” he said. “She’s nervous around other drivers. It’s easier for her to practice on the highway when it’s empty.”
“The highway? She’s only had her permit for a month.”
“She’s ready,” Patrick said. “She’s good, Bea. She’s really good.”
I looked at him.
“It’s a school night,” I said.
“I know. We’ll do earlier ones on the weekend.”
I accepted his explanation.
I want to be honest about that. I didn’t push. I didn’t ask more questions.
Because it was Patrick. And I trusted Patrick.
But Ellie changed.
It happened slowly, over November. So slowly that I didn’t notice it at first. And then all at once, I couldn’t stop noticing.
She stopped talking about school. She used to come home and tell me everything. Who said what at lunch. Which teacher was being unfair. What happened in drama club. Now she just said, “It was fine,” and went upstairs.
She stopped eating. Not completely. But she’d push her food around on her plate at dinner and say she wasn’t hungry. She’d always been a big eater. Patrick used to joke that she had a hollow leg.
She stopped going to drama club. She said she was too tired.
She was always tired.
And she started doing something that made the back of my neck go cold.
Whenever Patrick mentioned driving, Ellie would look at him. Before she answered. Every time.
“Want to go out tonight, kiddo?” he’d say at dinner.
And Ellie would look at him across the table. A long look. Like she was checking something. Like she was waiting to see what she was supposed to say.
Then she’d say, “Okay.”
Not yes. Not sure. Not the excited yes yes yes she used to give him in October.
Just okay.
Quiet. Flat.
