Ellie, who had been listening with wide eyes, finally spoke.
“Are you my grandpa?”
Walter looked at me — asking permission, the way a man asks who has learned the hard way that he doesn’t get to decide these things.
I nodded.
“Yeah, kiddo,” he said, his voice breaking. “I think I am.”
Ellie considered this with the seriousness of a nine-year-old.
Then she said, “Do you get free ice cream forever, if you drive the truck?”
Walter laughed — a wet, astonished, joyful laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”
“Cool,” said Ellie, and just like that, in the way only children can, she decided he was family.
It would take me longer.
But watching my daughter climb onto the picnic bench next to a man I’d been told was dead — watching him look at her like she was the whole sky — something in me that had been clenched for twenty-five years began, very slowly, to loosen.
