I sat down on the edge of the kitchen chair and stared at it for a long time.
Father’s Day had always been hard. The first one after David died, Caleb and I didn’t even mention it. We just got through the day the way you get through a bad storm, inside, with the curtains closed, waiting. The second year, I took him to the movies to distract him. He sat through the whole thing without eating any popcorn, and in the car afterward he said, “You don’t have to do that, Mom.” The third year was last year. He spent the whole day in his room.
But a school assembly was different. An assembly meant a whole gym full of dads. Every kid with someone in the audience. Caleb sitting there with me and an empty chair where his father should have been.
That evening, I put the flyer on the kitchen table, unfolded and smoothed flat, and waited for him to come down.
