It had always been just my dad and me.
His name was Samuel Carter, though nobody ever called him that except the school district on tax forms and the occasional substitute teacher who didn’t know better. To everyone else, he was simply Mr. Carter, the janitor who had worked at Eastbrook High School longer than most of the teachers had been employed there.
And to me, he was just Dad.
My mother died the day I was born, something people mentioned carefully when they thought I wasn’t listening. For years I thought that meant my life started with a kind of apology hanging in the air, but Dad never once allowed that idea to stay in the room very long.
“You didn’t take anything from the world,” he used to tell me whenever I asked about her. “You were the best thing that ever happened to me.”
And because he said it with the quiet certainty of someone who truly believed it, I believed it too.
Dad raised me alone without ever making it seem like something difficult. Looking back now, I realize how much he must have sacrificed, how many hours he must have worked and how many nights he must have fallen asleep exhausted, but as a kid I only saw the parts he wanted me to see.
The pancakes every Sunday morning that were always shaped like animals even when they came out looking more like blobs.
The lunchboxes he packed before dawn because his janitor shift started early.
The way he sat on the bathroom floor one night watching YouTube tutorials on his phone so he could learn how to braid my hair before the first day of third grade.
