“You should have told me,” I whispered.
My tears fell across his cold fingers.
“You should have let me thank you, Dad.”
The nurse quietly set a small plastic bag near me.
“These were his personal belongings.”
Inside were Frank’s keys, his watch, and the battered brown wallet I had seen him carry for as long as I could remember.
I opened it.
Behind his driver’s license was an old, worn photograph.
Miley stood beside a kitchen table with a plate of star-shaped apple pancakes.
The edges had softened from years of being handled.
Behind that picture was another.
It was me at five years old, smiling broadly while holding up a crooked pancake with one blackened point.
Neither photograph had anything written on the back.
Frank had carried both of his daughters beside him every single day.
He had never tried to replace Miley with me.
He had not loved me because he had managed to forget her.
He had chosen to love me while remembering exactly what losing a child could do to a person.
That night, I went home.
My daughter was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me.
“Is Grandpa coming back?”
I sat beside her.
“No, sweetheart.”
Her face collapsed.
I wrapped my arms around her and held her until the worst of the crying passed.
Then I opened the drawer beside our stove.
Near the back lay Frank’s old star-shaped cutter, scratched and dark from decades of Sunday breakfasts.
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