“Who’s Ellie?”
Walter didn’t answer immediately.
Then he touched the edge of the picture.
“My daughter.”
His eyes remained on the photograph.
“She was born in 1978.”
Walter had been twenty-six.
His wife, Carol, had been twenty-four.
Neither knew anything about Down syndrome.
“The doctor talked about everything Ellie might never do,” Walter told us. “He barely talked about what she could do.”
The world was different then.
Support systems were different.
Attitudes were different.
Walter’s parents urged them to place Ellie in an institution.
Some doctors suggested the same thing.
Carol refused.
Walter…
hesitated.
“I loved my daughter,” he said. “But for too long, I was embarrassed by how other people looked at us.”
Caleb frowned.
“Why?”
Walter looked at him.
“Because I was weak.”
The answer came without excuses.
“When Ellie was six, she wanted a red dress for Christmas. She saw it in a catalog.”
