“She’s an inch off,” the operator kept saying, holding up the measuring stick like it settled the matter permanently. “She’s had a growth spurt since breakfast,” Marcus argued back, dead serious, until the operator finally waved her through just to end the negotiation.
Lily considered this the single greatest achievement of Marcus’s entire parenting career, and brought it up at least once a week for the rest of that summer.
Jonah won a stuffed bear at the ring toss and immediately gave it to Lily, who immediately named it something unpronounceable that stuck anyway.
He shrugged when I asked why he gave it away so fast. “She likes bears more than I like winning,” he said, like it was the simplest math in the world, and honestly, it probably was.
Standing in line for the Ferris wheel that night, Marcus put his hand on my shoulder, the same spot my father had touched almost exactly a year earlier.
