My Dad spent every minute he didn’t have to work at his bedside. Gram spent as much time consoling Dad as she did watching Chip. He was buried beside my Mom.
We were devastated. Gram gave up her house and moved in with us, saying we needed a woman’s touch. Dad became even quieter than before the accident. Gram filled the void left by my mother for me, but Dad remained lost, and I feared he would never fully return.
I was always independent minded even as a child, and spent more time with my Mom. When Chip came along he was overjoyed. As soon as he was able to walk he followed Dad everywhere. If you wanted Chip, see where Dad was at. That’s how he got his nickname. Everyone said he was a chip off the old block.
It was a pretty bleak summer.
When school started I gradually came out of my funk. Everything was going pretty good until about three weeks into my freshman biology class we began to examine genetics. The teacher did a class on blood types when the partially heard exchanges between my Dad and the doctors jelled in my head. I knew then Dad wasn’t Chips’ biological father. I became so ill Gram had to pick me up.
When we got home I told her why I had become ill. She hugged me gently and told me one day I would understand that life as an adult could be hard and confusing at times.
It seemed simple to me. You met someone. Fell in love. Spent the rest of your life together. Death do us part and all that. Apparently nothing is so cut and dried in the real world.
……………………
Gram told my Dad I had figured it out but he never discussed it with me. He stumbled on in a fog for almost two years.
All those years he told me how dangerous the machinery he worked with was came home to bite him. He slipped and was pulled into a machine, getting lacerations and a broken arm. He healed, but his arm required therapy.
His therapist was named Dorothy, but preferred Dottie. This woman alone restored my faith in females. She was a couple years older than my Dad, and they connected at once. I think it was because of her I went into physical therapy.
She was divorced. Health problems when she was younger made her unable to bear children. Her husband left shortly after. She told me once she had given up on love until she met Dad. They were married seven months after meeting.
Over the years I’ve looked at Dottie and understood why there were so many mean spirited in the world. God had accidentally given Dottie the love capacity of ten people. I never met a sweeter woman.
We started out slowly. Dottie had never been exposed to teen age boys and I had never had a stepmother. Enough time had gone by that I knew she wasn’t a replacement for my mother, so I looked at her as a new experience with no baggage.
I wasn’t cold to her, and we gradually warmed to each other. Her vast capacity to love found a willing recipient in a lonely teenage boy.
I never realized what I meant to her until one day about six months after she had moved in. My friends came by and wanted me to go to the mall. I still had about a month to go until I was sixteen and couldn’t drive.
“Let me ask my Mom if I can go.” I yelled to them. Turning around I saw Dottie looking at me with an odd expression.
I had never called her Mom before, even though I had been thinking in those terms for about a month.
“What about it, Mom? Can I go?”
She put her hands up to her mouth, burst into tears, and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door. I was freaked out.
Dad found me on the couch thirty minutes later. One look and he knew something was wrong.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s Dottie, Dad. I said something and she started crying and ran into the bedroom. I don’t know what I did to hurt her, honest.”
He knocked on the door.
“Dottie, what’s wrong hon? Did Wiley hurt your feelings?”
The door flew open and he was dragged into the bedroom. She was still crying, and it upset him.
“I’m gonna have a long talk to that boy, straighten him up, I promise.”
She finally found her voice.
“YOU WILL NOT! He didn’t say anything mean. He did something I thought no one would ever do. He called me MOM. He thinks of me as a mother. His mother. I never thought it would happen to me. I’m so happy I can’t stop crying.”
My father grinned, his life was just about perfect now. He looked at Dottie with pure love.
“Dottie, when you calm down, you better talk to your son. He thinks you’re upset with him. He’s sitting on the couch badly confused.”
She immediately jumped up and ran into the living room and nearly suffocated me with her hug.
“I love you, honey, So much.”
When I finally got her to let me breathe I made another error that sent her back into the bedroom.
“Geez, Mom. I love you too. What’s the big deal?”
Dad just grinned at me and told me to get my ass in the truck. I was still confused when he dropped me off at the mall and gave me thirty bucks. If I didn’t find my friends I was to call him to be picked up.
“I need to spend a little private time with your mother, and don’t worry. You did a very good thing today.”
When I got home there was a huge chocolate cake on the table. We destroyed it.
When I was seventeen and playing in bands for money, I scraped together enough to get Dottie a ring for Mothers Day. It had her birthstone, my birthstone, and Dads’ birthstone in it. She treated it with the same reverence as her wedding ring.