Surprise Dad Read Free Page A

finally confronted the truth—it was the wrong path. It would lead to a job she’d never be able to do well enough to satisfy her need to do everything perfectly.
    It had turned her world upside-down. She’d spent the summer thinking about it, examining her feelings, talking to a counselor, before she made her decision. While she’d told her mother that she just needed a while to think things over, she’d already decided not to go back to med school.
    She pushed aside the panic that overtook her each time she realized what she’d done. She’d figure it out, find a new path and start walking it with the same industrious spirit she’d always had.
    It wasn’t the end of the road for her. Just a detour.
    She was buttoning her white shirt when she heard the tap on her door. “Come in, Mom,” she called out, thinking, What now? How much more guilt can she heap on me?
    Elaine sat down on the edge of the bed. She was such a pretty woman, Allie thought, as blond as Allie was brunette, a bit plump from all those years of cooking and baking. She had a smooth, even temperament—until yesterday, when Allie had popped in with her bad news. Elaine Hendricks would never surprise or shock anyone. She…
    “I’ve been thinking,” her mother said slowly, “and I want to tell you a story.”
    Allie’s fingers stopped with a shirt button half-pushed in. About a girl who didn’t do what her mother said and turned into an iguana?
    “Before I married your father,” ’Elaine said, “I got cold feet.”
    Okay, this was a surprise. “You did not,” Allie protested. “You told me the first time you laid eyes on Dad you knew he was the one.”
    “Yes, until that engagement ring was on my finger. Then I started wondering if I was doing the right thing.” She pursed her lips as if she were reliving that moment of doubt. “My mother was fitting my wedding dress on me—I’ll never forget it—and when she started fastening it up the back, I said, ‘Stop.’ I stepped out of the dress, packed a bag, cashed in the bonds my grandmother had left me and went to Las Vegas.”
    Allie’s head swam. “Las Vegas?”
    “I tanned by the pool, read romances, watched sitcoms about perfect families and just worked at feeling young. But I also talked to newlywed women, and to the ones who were there to get divorces, listening to their stories of deciding they’d found the right man, and the stories from the divorcées about how they’d been wrong.”
    Allie nodded. No need to feel tense. She knew how the story ended.
    “What was Dad doing while you were…thinking?”
    “He called me every night, asking me if I was ready to come home, and each time, I told him I wasn’t sure yet. Then one day I was at the pool reading, felt someone watching me, looked up and there he was. ‘I need to do some thinking, too,’ he said. He plopped himself down on the lounge chair beside mine, and the rest is history.”
    The import of the story hit Allie at last. She sat on the bed beside her mother, put an arm around her shoulders and said, “You ran away. Just like me.”
    Elaine nodded ruefully. “That’s what occurred to me this morning. I ran away, so why was I so shocked when you did the same thing?”
    “Well, you were—”
    “I was being hypocritical. I’m sorry.”
    “But after you ran, you ended up making the right decision, don’t you think?” Allie said, remembering her tall, handsome, kind father whose dark eyes showed only love for her and her mother.
    “Oh, yes,” Elaine said. “And you will, too, sweetheart.”
    “Thanks, Mom,” Allie said, hugging her tight.
    “When I was remembering how lazy I was in Vegas,” Elaine said, and smiled at last, “I thought about you and how you’d started by getting a job. So I wondered if you might like to take on some volunteer work, too.”
    “Sure,” Allie said, so relieved she’d have been willing to shovel manure for an elderly dairy farmer. “What is it?”
    “Lilah Foster,