Page 5 of Lost Then Found
I love him in ways that feel too big for my chest.
In quiet, constant ways.
In I-love-you-every-single-day-even-when-you-pretend-you-don’t-hear-it kind of ways.
And still, some nights I lie awake and wonder if it’s enough. IfI’menough. That’s the thing no one tells you about parenting—how much it exposes the parts of yourself you still haven’t healed. How much you end up raising yourself right alongside your kid.
I want him to feel seen. To feel loved. To never feel like he was a mistake. I want to be everything for him, to try to fill every gap, every empty space.
I was eighteen when I found out I was pregnant. Eighteen. I hadn’t even finished my senior year of high school yet. I was still trying to figure out how to live in a world that felt too big and too small at the same time, in that vast space between childhood and adulthood. I was still uncertain about everything—still deciding whether to stay in Summit Springs or run far away to somewhere else, still figuring out how to boil water and make macaroni and cheese without ruining it completely. I didn’t know how to live on my own, let alone be a mother.
And then, in one moment, that all changed. I had to grow up. I had tobecome someone else, someone who could be enough for him. I wasn’t ready, but I had to be.
I became the girl who woke up early and stayed up through the night with a colicky baby. Who figured out how to stretch twenty bucks into groceries and gas. Who taught herself to parent without a blueprint, without a back-up, without a single soft place to land.
I didn’t have anyone to fall back on, not really. My mom left before I had the language to name what she took with her. She just…vanished. She was a shadow more than a person, and then one day, not even that.
My dad stuck around—but not for long. When I was fifteen, the ALS started taking him slowly. Quietly. I lost him in pieces. One forgotten word. One dropped fork. One silent dinner at a time. When I finally started grieving, I realized I’d already been doing it for years.
And by the time I was seventeen, I’d lost both of them in ways that didn’t look like the clean-cut endings you see in the movies. And at eighteen, I was standing in my bathroom, staring at those two pink lines in shaky hands, feeling completely and utterly alone.
But then there was Alice.
Alice was my dad’s oldest sister. Not my mom, not trying to be—but she showed up when no one else did.
She didn’t swoop in and fix everything. That wasn’t her style. But she gave me something I’d never had: a job, a place to stay, a light left on at the end of a long day. Stability. The kind that settles in your bones and makes you believe, maybe for the first time, that you’re not completely alone in the world.
She didn’t say much about it—just made space. Quiet, solid, permanent. Like she was building a landing pad I didn’t even know I needed.
And the truth is, I didn’t realize how much I leaned on her until she was gone.She held me together when I was too tired to do it myself and I don’t think I ever told her thank you.
Not in the way she deserved.
But I’m doing it now. Raising Hudson on my own. Figuring it out. Even when it’s messy. Even when I’m running on caffeine and crossedfingers.
And I like to think Alice would be proud of that.
She bought the Bluebell in 1978 when she was twenty-four, broke as hell and buzzing with the kind of stubborn hope only women like her seem to carry. She had a loan she probably wasn’t qualified for, a beat-up Buick, and the unshakable belief that it would all work out.
That was Alice.
She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t need a safety net. She just…jumped. She’d tell me the story like it was folklore—part myth, part gospel.
“There I was,” she’d say, wiping down the counter like I hadn’t heard it a hundred times, “standing in front of that bank, skirt too short, heels too high, staring that loan officer dead in the eye like I knew the first damn thing about running a diner.”
She always had something in her hands—a coffee pot, a rag, a plate of fries. Alice didn’t know how to be still. She’d grin and spin a cup between her fingers like she was telling a secret. “And you know what I learned that day, kid?”
I’d already be halfway through an eye roll. “Confidence is everything.”
She’d snap and point at me like I’d just earned my stripes. “Confidence,” she’d say, “is everything.”
Back then, the Bluebell was a mess. The walls were this awful yellow that made everyone look half-sick under the buzzing lights. The booths were sticky in summer, the griddle ran hot then cold then not at all, and the register jammed if you pressed the buttons too fast. The coffee maker groaned louder than the customers.
But Alice didn’t care. She showed up, day after day, like it all mattered. Like this tired little diner could be something more just because she believed it could.
And in the end? It was.
Because Alice built this place with nothing but grit and grace and a hell of a lot of caffeine—and she passed it down the same way. “Some people walk into a place and see problems,” she’d say, spinning a dish rag between her hands. “I walk in and see potential.”
