“Don’t you have baseball?”
“Day off. We have a game tomorrow, so I need to get right back to the airport after we have this conversation.”
“What conversation?”
He gestures to the top step and we both take a seat.
“We’ve had this conversation a handful of times throughout your life, Miller, but I don’t think it’s ever really sunk in. I’m hoping it will now.”
He intertwines his hands, leaning his elbows on his knees. “When your mom died—”
“Dad, we don’t need to talk about this.”
“We do.” He takes a deep inhale, starting again. “When your mom died, I had my dream career.”
“I know.”
“What I thought was my dream career,” he corrects. “Until my dream job walked right into my life, and suddenly, all I wanted was to be whatever you needed. I didn’t care about baseball anymore. I didn’t think twice about what could have been. All I saw was this little green-eyed girl who looked at me like I was her entire world.”
He shakes his head. “Never once, to this day, have I ever viewed our relationship or how our family came to be as a sacrifice. It’s been a privilege to be your dad.”
His voice cracks a bit on the last word, so I slide my palm over his shoulder, resting my head there.
“Do you remember the first time you called me that?” he asks.
I shake my head. He’s always been my dad. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t.
“It was the first Mother’s Day after your mother had passed and a mom from your kindergarten class was hosting a Mother’s Day tea party for all the moms. I was so new, taking on this role and I didn’t know how to handle it. I was pissed that she’d host something like that when your mother had only been gone for a few months. So, when all of the other moms filed into the classroom that day, I walked in too and sat right next to you.”
I exhale a chuckle. “You were wearing this giant floppy hat with purple flowers on it. I remember that.”
“Well, of course. It was a tea party. A hat was a requirement for a tea party and all the moms were doing it, so I did it too.”
I melt further into his shoulder.
“They all looked at me like I was completely out of my mind, but I just sat there drinking tea and eating little biscuits and basking in the smile you had on your face.” He shakes his head, his first tear falling onto the cement. “That became my new dream, seeing that smile every day.
“There was this one mom, she was a real piece of work. She was the one hosting the whole thing and she looked right at you and asked who I was in a tone that was so obvious she thought I shouldn’t be there, but you didn’t pick up on any of it. You just took a bite of one of those little cucumber sandwiches, looked her square in the eye, and said, ‘This is my dad.’ It was the first time you had ever called me that, and after the tea party I cried in your school’s bathroom for a solid thirty minutes.”
My eyes burn. “You never told me that.”
He tilts his head, placing a quick kiss to my hair. “It was one of the best days of my life. One of the scariest too, because that name holds so much weight. So much responsibility. And all I wanted to do was live up to it.”
My stomach hollows. I know exactly how he feels.
“Kai told me what Max called you.”
I lift my head from his shoulder to look at him. Red nose and shiny eyes.
“It’s hard to know if you’re living up to the name. There are no tests you get to pass or checkmarks you can aim for. And for someone like you, someone who has chased titles as a way to prove to yourself . . .” He pauses. “Or to prove to me that you’ve accomplished something, I’m sure that’s even scarier. You’re an All-American pitcher, a James Beard recipient, but you’ll never earn the title Best Parent because that award doesn’t exist. You can only try your best and hope it’s enough.”
“I don’t know how to . . .” I shake my head. “I have no idea how to be someone’s mom. I was just supposed to be there for a quick two months.”
“Do you think I had any idea how to be a dad?” he asks in rebuttal. “I was so far out of my comfort zone. I had gone from playing major league baseball to putting your hair in pigtails for school every morning. Do you think I knew how to do that? Hell no. I had to ask our neighbor to teach me. I had no idea how to deal with mean moms or mean girls in school, and don’t even get me started on how terrified I was when you got your first period, and you asked me to take you to the store. My Google search was questionable at best because I was trying to find the answers to the questions I knew you were going to have.”