Ashley
"Can I ask you something I've wanted to ask you for like a while now?" Kassie flat out asked. She had a big, empty house with Jack not around and her parents at work all the time.
I shrugged and nodded.
She hesitated, but eventually continued to ask, "What happened to your father?"
Hearing her question immediately struck me right in a nerve. I knew that someday I would have to explain, but it's never a story I want to retell.
My silence must have worried her, "You don't have to say if you don't want to."
I shook my head, "It's alright."
It's a sad story, of course, the story of how I lost my father. No story about losing the most important man in my life would be happy by any means. When we lived in Massachusetts as one happy family, my mother and my father and I, he would commute every day to the big city of Boston for his job. My dad saved lives everyday at the Boston Fire Department. I'm sure you can now see where this story is going. It is not the typical way that fire fighters are killed, my dad was not even on the clock. When he was driving home one night from a long, hard shift at the station, when I was only eleven years old, he saw a person in trouble on the side of the road at two in the morning. Naturally, being the hero that he is, he pulled his little Honda to the side of the road, got out in his fire uniform and ran to the rescue of a woman in a car engulfed in flames, obviously vulnerable and coming close to the kiss of death.
"Daddy died a hero," my mother would tell me, "He died trying to save another."
Whatever way Dad died, it obviously still stung. Dad and I were extremely close; even when he was busy at work or tired and just looking to take a nap, he would always make time for me and Mom.
Once he realized that the flames from the car were far past the point of extinguishing, he ran straight into the flames to wrestle the woman out who was passed out from the heat of her nearly fried vehicle. He ran out of time and in one way or another, the car exploded, killing both my father and the woman he was trying to save.
"Daddy died a hero." I would repeat to myself over and over again. Not a day goes by that I don't think about my dad.
Kassie didn't speak after I told her my story, she just reached over and gave me a huge hug.
"I'm sorry I made you tell that." she said, reaching up to my face and wiping a tear off of my cheek with her thumb.
I smiled, "I like telling people about my daddy the hero."
Kassie smiled back, "He really was a hero, he is a hero."
-------------------
Sorry for the short chapter but I wanted to include this part of the story since it is such a significant part of Ashley's life!
Hope you enjoyed!
xoxo, Haley.
