But before he sold it, he did one last run through our neighborhood, on a summer evening, music playing, and he gave every kid on the street a free strawberry shortcake bar, and Ellie rode in the passenger seat the whole way, ringing the bell.
I stood on the porch and watched my father and my daughter drive slowly down the street handing out ice cream, and I cried the good kind of tears, the kind I didn’t know I’d been saving for twenty-five years.
Here is what I’ve learned.
I grew up believing my father chose to leave, then believing he’d died, and both of those stories shaped me — made me guarded, made me someone who kept people at a careful distance, made me a woman who almost drove past her own father because a stranger with strawberry ice cream seemed too good and too strange to trust.
The truth was messier and kinder than either story.
