He would tell you now, looking back across eighteen years, that they were everything to each other.
He started calling her Bubbles when she was around four years old, after her favorite cartoon character, the sweet and joyful one who cried openly when things were sad and laughed the loudest when things were good.
The nickname fit her perfectly from the beginning and never stopped fitting.
Every Saturday morning, the two of them would settle onto the couch together with a bowl of cereal and whatever fruit Brad could afford that particular week, watching cartoons side by side while she tucked herself under his arm the way small children do when the world feels exactly right.
Raising a child alone on a hardware store salary, and later on a foreman’s wage, is not a romantic story.
It is a math problem, and the numbers are almost always tight.
Brad learned to cook because eating out was not an option the budget allowed.
He sat at the kitchen table and practiced braiding hair on a doll because Ainsley wanted pigtails for her first day of first grade, and he was not going to be the father who let her down over something as important as pigtails.
He packed her lunches every morning without complaint.
He attended every school play, every parent-teacher conference, every event that mattered to her, regardless of what shift he had worked the night before.
He was not a perfect father, and he would be the first one to say so.
