“I do, too.”

“He’s been gone for so long, but that pain still hits me when I think of him.” Sundance bent down with me as I snipped a bundle of purple tulips. Butch and Cassidy wrestled nearby.

“Me too, honey.”

Often my father, during his career in the military/government, would return to us pale and tired. A couple of times he came home with an arm wrapped or a bandage on his head, or he would be limping. He would take calls privately, so we couldn’t hear, and sometimes, as we were stationed in various locations, cars would come and get him and whisk him off in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t talk much about what he was doing.

I would climb on his lap, his green eyes smiling at me, his brown hair cut short, and say, “What did you do on your trip, Daddy?” And he would say, “I missed you and your sister and your mother.”

And I would giggle and say, “No, Daddy. What did you do? Tell me!”

And he would say, “I thought about coming home and reading you stories and chasing Jules on her bike and holding your mom’s hand.”

And I would giggle again and say, “Daddy! When you were gone, what happened?”

And he would say, “Let’s ask your mom to bake us a cake. You know I love cake and tea. Then we’ll read books together.”

And we would ask my mom, and she was so relieved to see him, so happy to have him home, I could tell even then, as a young child, that she would bake us a cake. White chocolate coconut cake. Hummingbird cake. Dark chocolate candy cane. We would eat cake, drink tea, and read books together.

“I always appreciated how you and Dad tried to help me with my premonitions and how you tried to help other people. You two taught me how to change the timing so that the premonition would pass them by, and I loved you for it. I don’t know if I ever told you that, but thanks, Mom.”

“Of course, honey.” She gave me a hug. My mom always hugs me. “We wanted to help them, but mostly we wanted to help you. From a young age, we had to have the most serious of conversations with you about what to say, what not to say, when to act, when not to.” She shook her head and wiped the sweat off her brow with her purple garden glove. “I was discussing ethics and morals with a five-year-old.”

“The worst was when I had premonitions about Dad. Remember that time I saw an explosion behind him and he kept walking over a bunch of rocks, as if he hadn’t heard it? And he wasn’t in his military clothes.”

“I remember that when you told your dad, his face went grim.”

“He asked me a lot of questions, and I told him what he was wearing and what I saw.”