“Because I’ve been scared for nine years that I was overstepping,” Travis said.
“Every time I wanted to call her mine, I’d think about her real dad. What if he shows up someday. What if she resents me for it. What if I take something that was never mine to take.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“When I said real dads, Jodi, I wasn’t talking about her. I was talking about me. I didn’t think I counted. I didn’t think I was allowed to count.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Then I watched your dad walk her out on that cane,” he said. “A seventy-nine-year-old man. Walking the whole length of that gym. And I thought, what in the world am I doing up here?”
He looked down at the rose.
“He showed up. That’s all a real dad is. The one who shows up. And I’ve been showing up for nine years, and telling myself it didn’t count.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over his.
His hands are rough. From the shed. From loading seed bags and fixing augers.
He turned his hand over. And he held on.
We sat there like that until Kaylee came home at eleven.
She came in through the back door in her warmup jacket. Her braid half undone. Smelling like pepperoni and the gym.
She stopped when she saw us at the table.
She looked at the rose.
Then she walked over and did something she hadn’t done since she was ten years old.
She sat down on Travis’s knee.
Like a little girl.
She’s five foot ten. She’s a middle hitter. She didn’t fit on his knee at all.
It didn’t matter even a little bit.
“I put my phone away during the party,” she said. “Everybody kept showing me the video. Somebody already put it on Facebook. Grandpa has four hundred likes.”
Travis laughed. It came out wet.
“Your grandpa doesn’t even know what Facebook is.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the best part.”
Then she was quiet for a minute.
And she said, to the side of his head, “I wasn’t mad that you said no, Travis. I was mad because I thought you didn’t want to.”
“I always wanted to,” he said. “Every single day. I was just scared.”
“Scared of what?”
He thought about it.
“Of you telling me I wasn’t your dad.”
Kaylee pulled back and looked at him. Like he’d just said something in a foreign language.
“Travis,” she said. “Who do you think taught me how to braid my own hair?”
That’s when I had to get up and go stand at the kitchen sink for a while.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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