Chapter 8: Everything That Was Always There
Three weeks later, I drove to Frank's house.
I had gotten the address from Daniel, who had gotten it from a phone book entry so old it listed a landline.
Frank still had a landline.
That felt right somehow.
He lived in a small house on a corner lot about twenty minutes from my neighborhood.
A vegetable garden ran along the side fence.
A wind chime hung near the front door.
The ice cream truck was parked in the driveway, clean and still.
I knocked.
He answered in a flannel shirt, holding a dish towel, looking genuinely surprised.
"Sarah."
"I should have come sooner," I said.
"I'm sorry I didn't."
He waved that away.
"Come in."
His kitchen was small and warm and smelled like coffee.
He poured me a cup without asking.
We sat across from each other at a table that had a stack of crossword books on one end and a coffee ring on the other.
"Daniel called me," Frank said.
"Said the visit went well."
"It did."
"He seemed lighter after." Frank wrapped both hands around his mug.
"I haven't heard him sound like that in a long time."
"He said you felt responsible," I said.
"For taking so long to find me."
Frank looked at the table.
"Your father asked me to find you when you turned eighteen," he said.
"I tried.
You'd moved twice.
Changed your name when you got married.
I lost the trail." He paused.
"I kept looking, on and off, for years.
Then three summers ago I was driving a new route and I saw a little girl who looked exactly like a photograph your father used to carry."
I set my cup down.
"He carried a photograph of me?"
"Wallet-sized.
You were maybe six in it.
Red jacket." Frank looked up.
"He showed it to me once.
Said it was the last picture he had of you before everything fell apart."
I thought about the photograph in my cabinet.
The girl in the red jacket.
The boy squinting into the sun.
"I found that picture last week," I said.
"I'd kept it for thirty years and told myself I didn't know who the boy was."
Frank nodded slowly.
"People protect themselves from things they're not ready to know."
"I think I was always ready," I said.
"I just didn't have anyone to open the door."
He looked at me for a moment.
"Your father would have been proud of you," he said.
"The way you handled all of this.
He always said you were the one who ran toward things instead of away from them."
"He said that?"
"Many times." Frank smiled, small and certain.
"He talked about you a lot."
I looked at the window above the sink.
The vegetable garden outside.
A row of tomatoes staked neatly against the fence.
"Why an ice cream truck?" I asked.
"Of all the things you could have done."
Frank gave a short laugh.
"I retired early.
My wife suggested it.
She said it would keep me moving and give me a reason to be in neighborhoods I wouldn't otherwise visit." He paused.
"She d*ed two years before I found you.
She never knew I was still looking."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"She would have liked knowing it worked out," he said.
"She believed in that kind of thing.
Loose ends finding their way closed."
We sat quietly for a moment.
"Frank," I said.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"The strawberry shortcake bars.
Was that deliberate?"
He looked at me steadily.
"Your father told me once that if I ever found you, I should make sure you knew he hadn't forgotten," he said.
"I couldn't exactly walk up to your door and say that.
But I thought — if I could get the right thing to the right person—"
"You thought I'd remember," I said.
"I thought it might open something," he said.
"Even if you didn't know what."
I thought about the first evening Ellie had come home with the strawberry shortcake bar.
The way I'd gone still.
The feeling I hadn't been able to name.
My father, reaching across thirty years through a man in a faded baseball cap and a neighborhood ice cream truck.
"It worked," I said.
Frank nodded once.
"I know."
I stayed another hour.
We talked about my father — the man Frank had known, the work they'd done together, the small ordinary details that no one had ever thought to tell me.
The way he took his coffee.
The joke he always made on Fridays.
The fact that he kept a spare key under a ceramic frog by his back door and never remembered to move it.
Small things.
True things.
Things that made him real in a way he had never quite been before.
When I stood to leave, Frank walked me to the door.
"Thank you," I said.
"For not giving up."
He shook his head.
"I made a promise."
"You kept it."
He held the door open.
The afternoon light was warm and flat, the kind that makes everything look a little golden.
"Sarah," he said, as I stepped onto the porch.
I turned.
"He loved you," Frank said.
"Every day.
He never stopped."
I stood there for a moment with the wind chime turning softly above me.
"I know," I said.
"I think I always knew."
I walked to my car.
I didn't cry until I reached the end of his street — and even then, it wasn't grief.
It was something else.
Something that had been sealed up for thirty years finally finding air.
I drove home.
Ellie was in the front yard with a popsicle, waiting for me the way she always did when she knew I'd been somewhere important.
She looked up.
"Well?" she said.
"Well," I said.
"I think everything is going to be okay."
She considered this with great seriousness.
Then she held out the popsicle.
It was strawberry.
I took it.
---
Some things lost don't stay lost forever — they just wait for the right person to keep looking.
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