“You look terrified,” I told him once.
“I had every right to be terrified,” Dad replied.
“Why? Were you afraid of dropping me?”
“No. I was afraid you were going to start crying during the principal’s speech.”
“Did I?”
“For twenty-three uninterrupted minutes.”
I laughed. “Maybe I didn’t like the speech.”
“Nobody liked the speech, Ellie. You were just the only person brave enough to say something.”
That frightened teenage boy became the only parent I ever knew.
Dad was seventeen when I entered his life.
He had been delivering sandwiches for a twenty-four-hour diner on the edge of Fairview, Ohio. His mother had died two years earlier, and his father was working construction jobs in different states, returning home only a few times a year.
Dad lived mostly alone in a narrow house near the railroad tracks.
He went to school in the morning, worked in the evening, and spent his nights studying at the kitchen table.
Then, one rainy Friday in November, he came home shortly after midnight and found a baby carrier sitting beneath the awning beside his back door.
At first, he thought one of his friends was playing a cruel joke.
Then he heard me crying.
I was wrapped in a green blanket, soaked around the edges from the rain. Beside me was a bottle, a small bag of diapers, and an envelope with Mason’s name written across the front.
Inside was a note.
Mason,
Please take care of her tonight. I need time to figure things out.
Her name is Eleanor.
I’ll come back tomorrow.
The note was signed by Vanessa Hart, the nineteen-year-old woman who lived two houses down.
Vanessa had occasionally asked Dad to watch me while she went to work. He knew my father had disappeared before I was born. He also knew Vanessa’s new boyfriend wanted nothing to do with a baby.
Dad expected her to return the following morning.
She did not.
By Sunday, her apartment was empty.
