It had always been just the two of us—my dad, Johnny Walker, and me, Nicole.
My mom died giving birth to me, which was a tragedy I never got to fully understand because I never got to meet her. What I did understand, very early on, was that my dad had made a choice on the day I was born. He had chosen me. He had chosen to be both mother and father. He had chosen to show up, day after day, year after year, even though being a single parent was harder than anything I could have comprehended as a child.
He did everything. He packed my lunches before heading to work at St. Catherine’s Elementary School, where he had worked as the head janitor for twenty-two years. Every single lunch was made with care—a sandwich cut into triangles because I preferred them that way, an apple cut into slices so I wouldn’t have to bite into it, a note written on a napkin with some small piece of encouragement or a terrible joke that made me groan.
He flipped pancakes every single Sunday without fail, even when he was exhausted from working double shifts. Chocolate chip pancakes on my birthday. Silver dollar pancakes on random Tuesdays when he thought I seemed sad. Buttermilk pancakes on Sunday mornings when we had nowhere to be except with each other.
And sometime around second grade, when I asked him to teach me how to braid my hair, he taught himself by watching YouTube tutorials late at night when I was asleep. His fingers were clumsy at first—he’d braid too tight, or forget the pattern and have to start over—but he kept practicing until he could do French braids and Dutch braids and fishtail braids that would hold all day.
But my dad was also the janitor at the same school I attended.
Which meant years of hearing exactly what everyone thought about that.
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