I wrote back, “Perfect, because your retirement fund just lost its sponsor.”
They laughed it off. Nine days later, their group chat was on fire, and my dad was begging me to talk. I’d been watching the clock since 6:00 a.m., trying to make it special.
Ellie turned 10 that day—double digits—and she’d been talking about it since summer, counting down like it was Christmas. The night before, I blew up thirty balloons until my cheeks ached and my fingertips smelled like rubber. I stuck them to the ceiling with cheap tape that didn’t hold very well, the kind that curls away once the air in the house warms up.
By morning, half of them were sagging toward the floor, but she didn’t care. She woke up and screamed like she won the lottery. With her hair all over the place and a sleep crease across her cheek, she ran down the hall yelling, “I’m 10!”
She launched herself into my arms so hard I almost dropped the pancakes.
There was no party, not a real one. Just me and her, like it’s always been. But I’d decorated the kitchen anyway.
I sprinkled confetti across the table and taped a hand-drawn banner over the doorway, and I made a little scavenger hunt that led her around the house until she found her gift. A pink cruiser bike with a white basket, streamers on the handlebars, and a bell she wouldn’t stop ringing for the next hour. She cried when she saw it.
Not loud sobs—just those surprised, silent tears that spill over when a kid doesn’t know how to hold a feeling that big. She kept wiping her cheeks with the backs of her hands and laughing at the same time, like she was embarrassed by her own happiness. “I can ride to the park,” she kept saying, as if saying it made it real.
“I can ride to the library.”
She ran her fingertips along the basket like it was made of glass. Then she did something that made my throat pinch. She made little party hats for everyone.
I’m not kidding. She used glitter paper, glued on stickers, and wrote Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie Bri, and Mom in her crooked handwriting. She even taped toothpicks to them so they’d stick up.
She laid them out carefully on the table, so sure they’d come by at some point. “Do you think they’ll get here before cake?” she asked, like it was just a matter of time. Like she believed in them more than I ever could.
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