…couldn’t keep.”
I looked closer at the photograph. The woman in the bed wasn’t my mother. She looked almost exactly like her. But I knew that face. My aunt Ruth, my mother’s younger sister. She’d moved away when I was a teenager, and we’d lost touch. My mother always said Ruth “made her choices.”
“Ruth was my mother,” the young woman said. Her name was Jenna. She was twenty-four. The baby in her arms was her son.
Ruth had been diagnosed with cancer while pregnant. She was alone. The father had left. My mother had died three years earlier, and my father had promised her on her deathbed that he’d keep an eye on her little sister.
He kept that promise. He drove Ruth to every appointment. He was there when Jenna was born, and he was there three months later when Ruth died.
Jenna was about to go into foster care. My father, a widower in his late forties, couldn’t adopt her himself. So he found a family through his church, a couple who’d been trying to have children for years. He helped pay for the adoption lawyer and visited Jenna every birthday as “Uncle Frank.” He never told me or my brother. He said it was Ruth’s story to tell, and Ruth was gone.
“He paid for my college,” Jenna said. “He never let me thank him.”
Last year, Jenna’s husband walked out on her and their baby. Her adoptive parents had both died. She was behind on rent. My father had already spent most of his savings on her tuition years ago. His pension covered his own bills, and nothing more. So, at seventy-four, he took the night shift at McDonald’s and gave her every paycheck.
I drove to my father’s house at six in the morning. He was just getting home, still in his uniform.
“You weren’t supposed to find out,” he said.
“Dad,” I said. “She’s my cousin. She’s family. You don’t get to carry this alone anymore.”
My brother and I set up a fund for Jenna and the baby that week. She’s back on her feet now, working as a nurse. My father quit McDonald’s. He says he misses the free coffee.
Jenna and her son come to Sunday dinner now. Last week, the baby took his first steps across my father’s living room, right into Grandpa Frank’s arms.
