Three Fathers -- by Anne Shier

My name is Amy. Recently, on the evening of Saturday June 15, the day before Father’s Day, I took three fathers out to dinner. I had never done that before—take three fathers out for dinner all at the same time. I left the decision of the particular restaurant to my 8-year-old grandson, Joey, who was also present, and he said, “Let’s go to Shoeless Joe’s for dinner.” Joey always seemed to know which restaurants were the best places in which to eat. We all thought he made a great choice, so the five of us piled into two cars, and away we went.

        The three fathers were my elder roommate, Dale, my younger roommate, Kent, and my son, Brad. Ironically, my own father was not able to attend. I had spoken with him over the phone earlier that day, wishing him a Happy Father’s Day. But since he lived relatively far from me—deep in the city of Toronto—he could not make it to our little celebration. I resolved to send him his Father’s Day card as soon as possible, hoping it wouldn’t arrive too late.

 These three fathers were very special to me. Of these three, I had been closest to Dale in the past (my son, Brad, was just 7 when we met him). I’d first met Dale in the late 1990s, and we’d become a couple a month later. He was a 45-year-old divorced father with a daughter, 16, and a son, 12. Two years later, Dale then became my ex-boyfriend, but somehow we stayed fast friends. We didn’t always see each other or talk all the time, but I knew he was a good and kind person—the kind of friend I needed to keep in my life. He was always there when I needed him and I had reciprocated on two different occasions when I had to call for an ambulance to take him to the hospital because of critical illness. There weren’t many people whose lives had had such an impact on me or vice versa, but Dale was one of those people.

 Later on, Dale came to live with me as my roommate in my new house in Ajax in November 2009. This house was “new” to me but was actually more than 50 years old. It needed lots of renovations and was considered a “fixer-upper.” Dale was relatively energetic in those days; he was still working at his full time job as a welding technician, but he planned on retiring very soon, in the spring of 2010. My new house was going to be his hobby farm, which would keep him busy once his retirement started. There was a lot of stuff that had to be done on my house—not all at once, of course, but over months and even years. I was thankful that he had agreed to move in with me.

 At the same time, the people in both our families seemed to think Dale and I were getting back together again as a couple, but that was not at all the case. Not only that, some of my teacher-colleagues at my school seemed to think the same thing. As unusual as this living arrangement was, we knew we would both benefit more by being friends, not a couple. That was the way we wanted it and that was the way it worked best, no matter what anybody else thought about it. We finally just decided to ignore what anybody else thought or said about our living together. We, ourselves, knew what the true situation was and that was all that mattered to either of us.

 Things went on for a while like this. My son, Brad, and his son, Joey, had also moved in with me; they were content to live in my finished apartment downstairs in the basement. It was a very nice but small apartment. However, Brad, being a 27-year-old single father needed to save money, and he knew both Dale and I would help him out with Joey whenever he needed us, which was usually on a weekend when Brad wasn’t working and wanted to party. That was also an unusual living arrangement, but it worked really well—until about a year and a half later when Brad suddenly announced to us that he was starting to feel really cramped in this tiny apartment and saving money was no longer the priority it had once been for him. He was aiming to move out into his own house in Oshawa. To this end, Brad had gotten what he considered a “good” deal on a house (0 percent down payment)—meaning that he didn’t have the money for the usual 5 percent down payment—but he very much wanted to move out and we didn’t try to stop him. He and Joey needed their own space, so away they went. However, since Oshawa was only 15 minutes away from us (via the 401), we knew we’d still be seeing them from time to time.

 For a year or so, it was pretty quiet around the house until Kent, Dale’s 33-year-old son, called his father one spring day and told him he needed to move down to Ajax from Keswick to work. He was not getting along well with his boss, he said, because his boss was a self-serving prick who constantly gave him the worst construction jobs that needed to be done on their current construction project. Not only that, his co-workers all sucked up to the boss, making the whole thing totally disgusting for Kent to continue working there. Kent was a good worker with great skills as a carpenter. His boss simply did not appreciate what he had to offer. Enter his new boss-to-be, Taylor, a seemingly fair, kind and considerate man.   Taylor, knowing what kind of talents Kent had as a carpenter and all-round construction worker, offered Kent a chance to work with him, just the two of them, on various construction projects in and around the Ajax-Pickering area. It was such a good offer that Kent could not afford to turn it down so he happily accepted.

 That’s how Kent came to live with Dale and me in my finished basement apartment that summer. It was just the right size for one adult. He had two young daughters from a previous relationship, but they lived with their mother most of the time. Dale, being Kent’s father, was the grandfather to Kent’s two young daughters, Kyra and Janine, so Dale was quite naturally delighted to have Kent living with us downstairs. The three of us got along so well and I could foresee no real problems living together, since I’d known both of them for so long. It was a good solution for all of us because I could use the extra money that Dale and Kent gave me monthly for their rent and household bills and Kent could bring his daughters over to stay here as often as he had the chance to, which Dale and I just loved.

  Given that we were all sort of thrown together by the random events in our individual lives, it was really nice to have what I would call “family” in every sense of the word. Though we certainly weren’t all related to each other by blood or marriage, simply by living together under the same roof at various times of our lives, made us “family.” If that didn’t constitute “family,” I don’t know what did.

   These three fathers have come to mean the world to me. I’ve depended on them for help with my household renovations and repairs, with my mortgage and household bills, for companionship and friendship, and for the togetherness of knowing them for at least a quarter of a century of my life. How many people can say that about the most significant people in their lives? Unless I include my parents and relatives too, there aren’t many people whom I would deem qualified as “significant others” in my life. It has given me a new perspective on life in the new millennium, when people often drift apart for years and don’t always reconnect. I am a very lucky person who has people who genuinely care for me, my son and my grandson, and I would not trade that kind of caring and compassion for anything in the world.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA