The Drive Home and What Letty Asked About Her Father
Outside the school, the air was cold and clean with that particular sharpness that October carries in the Midwest.
Jenna and Millie walked to their car. Jenna looked back once and put her hand up in a small wave, and I put mine up back. Millie was telling Letty something, and Letty was listening with her whole face, the way she listened when something actually mattered to her.
In the car, driving home, Letty held Jonathan’s hard hat in her lap with both hands, like it was something breakable.
We drove for a few blocks in silence.
Then she said: “Do you think Dad would have cried today?”
I thought about it honestly. Not the answer a parent gives to make a child feel better, but the actual answer.
“Absolutely,” I said. “And then he would have told everyone he had allergies.”
Letty laughed — the real kind, the full-body kind that she gets from Jonathan and not from me — and I felt it move through the car like something alive.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I think Millie is going to wear the wig.”
“I think so too.”
“Even if she doesn’t, though.”
“Even if she doesn’t,” I agreed.
She looked out the window at the passing streets. “He would have liked her.”
“He would have liked her mom too,” I said. “He had good instincts about people.”
Letty turned the hard hat over in her lap. The purple star caught the light.
“He liked us best though,” she said. Not asking. Knowing.
“Without question,” I said.
Jonathan hadn’t come back to us. That was still true and would always be true and there was no softening it into something manageable. But because of our daughter, because of a pair of kitchen scissors and a bathroom where she had heard someone cry, six men had driven across town with his hard hat and a check and a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, and his love had arrived in a room where we needed it.
That was not nothing.
That was, it turned out, almost everything.
What do you think about Piper and Letty’s story? Drop a comment on the Facebook video — we want to hear from you. And if this one moved you, please share it with your friends and family today. Some stories remind us that love doesn’t stop when someone leaves — it finds other ways to arrive. 
