The Man in Row Three

Six months old

I met Shayla when she was twenty-four and working the front counter at a parts store where I picked up filters twice a week.

She had a baby at home and a babysitter she couldn’t afford, and she laughed at my jokes even when they weren’t any good.

The first time I held Ava she was six months old and she spit up all down the front of me. Shayla was mortified.

I said it was the cleanest thing that had been on that shirt all week, and Ava grabbed my beard with both fists and wouldn’t let go.

Her biological father had left before she was born. He signed what he needed to sign and moved to Colorado, and as far as I know he has never once asked about her.

I don’t say that to run him down. I say it so you know there was an empty chair, and I sat in it.

I was not a natural. I had grown up with two brothers on a farm south of Garnett, and the closest I had come to a baby was bottle calves.

Shayla and I got married at the courthouse when Ava was two. Ava wore a dress with a big bow in the back and threw rose petals at the clerk, who was a good sport about it.

That night Ava fell asleep on my chest in the recliner, and I didn’t move for three hours.

I never adopted her. I want to say that plainly, because it matters later. Her father would have had to sign away his rights, and every time we talked about it, something came up.

I told myself it didn’t matter. She was mine in every way that counted. I was the one at the pediatrician when she got her shots.

I was the one who sat on the bathroom floor with her at two in the morning when she had the stomach flu.

The bow

When Ava was three, she got invited to a birthday party at a little gym in town, and Shayla was working a Saturday shift.

That left me. Ava came to me with a hair bow the size of a dinner plate and a brush and said, “Make it like Mommy does.”

I tried. I made a mess of it. She looked in the mirror and her bottom lip started to go, and I said, “Give me ten minutes,” and I went out to the garage with my phone.

There is a video on the internet, posted by a mother in Tennessee with five daughters, that teaches you how to put a little girl’s hair in a ponytail and tie a big bow on it so it stays through a whole birthday party.

I watched it eleven times on the tailgate of my truck.

I practiced on a bungee cord wrapped around a socket handle. I am not proud of how long it took. When I came back in, I sat Ava on the kitchen counter and I did it slow, the way the woman in the video said, and it held.

Ava ran to the hall mirror and turned her head side to side and said, “You did it, Daddy.” Then she made me promise I would do it every time.

I did it every time for three years, school pictures and church and two Halloweens.

That was also the year we made up the wave. Ava was in a Christmas program at the church preschool, and she was so scared of the crowd that she cried in the hallway before it started.

I told her to find me, and when she found me, I would tap my nose and wiggle four fingers, and it would mean I was right there.

She found me. I tapped my nose and wiggled four fingers. She tapped her nose and wiggled four fingers back, standing on the risers in a shepherd costume made out of a pillowcase, and then she sang every word louder than anybody.

After that it was ours. The first day of kindergarten, from the bus window. Her first swim lesson at the city pool.

The time she got stitches in her chin at the urgent care and I had to wait in the hall. Tap the nose, wiggle four fingers. I’m here.