Happily Letter After(10)

Dad would always calculate the exact time it would take for me to arrive based on my train. As usual, he was standing at the door waiting for me.

He gave me a huge hug. “How’s my Sadie?”

Looking up at something dangling near the top of the door, I said, “I’ve been really good. I see you made a new contraption?”

My father loved to create instruments that he believed could predict the weather. Even though there was plenty of technology in this day and age to do so, he preferred to build tools from scratch that he swore were just as good if not better than the best Doppler radar. He would give them cute names, too.

“What’s this one called?” I asked.

“The humbug.”

“What does that stand for?”

“The ‘hum’ comes from the fact that the strip of paper right there expands when it becomes more humid. The more it expands, the more chance for a storm. The ‘bug’ just sounded good with ‘hum.’”

“You’re so funny.” I smiled.

The interesting thing was, I remember the weather-instrument hobby starting not too long after my mother died. It was his way of keeping his mind occupied, perhaps, so that it didn’t wander to things that were too painful.

“I just put on a fresh pot of coffee,” he said as I followed him inside.

“Ohhhh, a fresh pot,” I teased. “To what do I owe this honor? I must be someone special.”

I always joked with my dad whenever he made a fresh pot of coffee, because normally he made only one large pot in the morning for himself and poured from the same carafe throughout the course of the entire day. He’d just nuke it in the microwave. But he knew I liked my java fresh, so he’d suck it up and dump out the old coffee before making a new pot whenever I came over. I tried to buy him one of those Keurig machines once so that he could have fresh mugs of coffee all day, but he said he didn’t mind his coffee a little burned and stale and preferred not to contribute to the environmental hazard of plastic waste.

On the counter was a gigantic bowl of tomatoes in varying shades of red, green, and orange along with a lineup of cucumbers and peppers on some paper towel.

“Let me guess . . . cucumber and tomato salad for lunch?”

“With feta and olives.” He winked. “And warm pita bread from the bakery.”

My stomach growled. “Mmm. That sounds so good.”

There was nothing like the comfort of home. Even though this house brought about painful memories, there were many good ones. Lazy lunches on a Sunday with my father definitely fell into the good category.

He sat down across from me. “So what brings you home early? I thought you weren’t coming until next weekend?” he asked as he poured a mug of coffee and handed it to me.

“Yeah, well, I’ve sort of had an issue at work that made me think of you.”

“Hope it wasn’t one of those foolish men you date.”

“No.” I laughed. “Although that situation really hasn’t improved.” I sighed. “This came from the Holiday Wishes column. You know, the one I normally get assigned around the holidays?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well, there’s this little girl who sent a letter in to the column even though it’s summer, and it’s set off a chain of interesting events.”

Over two cups of coffee, I spent the next several minutes telling my father the story of Birdie and her letters. He listened intently and, as expected, found the entire thing quite endearing.

He shook his head as he poured more coffee for himself. “I can’t get over that adorable name. It sounds like something I would name one of my weather instruments.”

“Yeah . . . she’s adorable like you would imagine a Birdie to be, too.” I shook my head. “I’m very confused, though.”

“Are you wondering whether you should keep it going if she writes back?”

“I’m definitely torn over that. The other thing is, this whole situation has actually got me thinking a lot about my own childhood. Because of how similar Birdie’s and my situations are.”

“It’s definitely eerie that she lost her mother around the same age as you.”

“Yeah.” I sighed, then after a few seconds of inner debate, I decided to bring up the subject I’d been very curious about. “She mentioned in one of her letters that she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and caught her dad chatting with a woman on his laptop. She said it scared her, and she ran back to bed. It made me wonder whether you used to date when I was small. I always assumed you weren’t with any women at the time, because you didn’t do it in front of me. I suppose that might have been naive.”

My father looked down into his cup and nodded. “I’ll never love anyone like I loved your mother. You know that. No amount of dating in those years was gonna erase that.” He looked up at me again. “But loneliness does set in eventually. And there were times I’d tell you I was going to play poker with the guys or that I was heading over to your uncle Al’s when I’d really be meeting up with a lady.”

I nodded, taking that revelation in for a moment. “Around what age was I then?”

“It was probably about four years after Mom died, so maybe ten? The first couple of years, I hadn’t been able to even consider looking at another woman. But once I hit that three-year mark, well, it became about a man having needs. It had nothing to do with wanting to move on from your mother. You know what I mean?”