Under his suit jacket, he wore the reindeer sweater. The one with the nose that plays “Jingle Bells.”
He pressed it right after we said I do.
The clerk laughed so hard she had to sit down.
Afterward, we went to dinner at our Italian restaurant on Fifth Street. All of us. Dad and Jenna and Mike and Sarah and Lily and Ethan and me.
Paolo came over to the table. He looked at Lily in her yellow dress. He looked at the ring on my hand. He looked at Ethan’s reindeer sweater.
“So,” he said. “Three spaghetti carbonara, one with no pepper, and what does the young lady want?”
“Pasta with butter,” Lily said. “Please. And extra cheese. And can I have a Shirley Temple with two cherries?”
Paolo wrote it all down very seriously.
“Two cherries,” he said. “For a special day.”
He winked at me.
Sunday mornings are different now.
Ethan still makes pancakes, still too big, still burned on one side. But now he makes them shaped like Mickey Mouse. Lily taught him. They look like potatoes with ears. She says that’s how her mom’s used to look at the beginning, too.
Lily sits at the kitchen table in her pajamas with Ruby propped up next to her plate. I drink my coffee. Ethan flips pancakes and gets batter on the ceiling.
“Daddy,” Lily said last Sunday, with her mouth full, “you burned the side again.”
“I always burn the side.”
“I know,” Lily said. “That’s how I know they’re yours.”
Ethan looked at me across the kitchen.
I looked back at him.
For six years, he made pancakes for two people who never got to sit at the same table.
Now we do.
