Chapter 1

Welcome all. This is a story of how I learned one of the greatest lessons of life. Now my name is Torrance, but most of my life I have been called Terri. When I was in my sophomore year of college I was doing the usual kissing up to a professor and ended up tasked with doing freshman orientation. That day changed my life because I met a tiny little lady with green eyes that went right through me. Her smile made the day seem brighter and I knew I had to try and get closer to her.

Fast forward a few years and I was a new up and comer with an MBA for a company on the early edge of what would become the tech boom of the early nineties. I was a new father and husband to the wonderful girl with the green eyes. With her smarts running our lives, while I kept my shoulder to the wheel, our lives were going great.

Another decade or so saw me in the top ranks of one of the real power houses of the industry. We had survived the tech bust and used our survival to pull in the leftovers of so many companies that we grew even more. This put my retirement a lot closer so I could begin to enjoy the life my wife and four daughters had been building.

I know what you’re thinking. I was a workaholic spending all my time working and I didn’t see what was going on behind my back the whole time ... well you couldn’t be more wrong. I took every moment of vacation time and even squeezed out the occasional day off to make sure I was at recitals, events, and any special moments my daughters had in their lives. My wife and I had eyes only for each other and even at forty made love like we were still teenagers in the blush of first love. My little girls were the apple of their old man’s eye and I was proud to have four daddy’s girls that got excited when I walked in the door.

When our last daughter was getting ready to spread her wings my bride and I began talking about how to spend some of our retirement funds doing things we never had time to do while the girls were growing up. I was all for buying an RV and spending a year traveling around the nation, she was partial for touring Asia. Then she began to feel tired all the time. The doctors said she was just fine and probably suffering from early menopause. We decided to work around it and get ready to help our youngest as she headed to college. When the pain started hitting her we took her to a specialist and they said that she had Lymphoma and that it was advanced. There were treatments we could try to slow it down, but it wouldn’t buy much time.

Now we catch up a little closer to home. I was a widower with four loving daughters who worried constantly about their old man. My eldest Jenna was married to a pretty good guy and my bride lived long enough to see me walk her down the aisle. My next daughter Cindy had married young, while still in college. The next youngest was Traci who not only married straight out of high school but was already a mother to two wonderful twin girls. My youngest Jessi had a hard time leaving for college weeks after her mother died but I refused to let her just sit with me and mourn. She had a future to create for herself.

I fell back on doing something I had dabbled with for years and decided to get serious about. Researching and making booze. No I didn’t become an alcoholic, though it was tempting, I was researching historical cordials and flavored alcohols. I also began to ferment my own mead with natural flavorings. Many of our old friends had come to me over the years with special requests around the holidays and I always loved giving bottles of custom made alcohol to them all.

This brings me even closer to now, and the start of my education. I was filtering and racking a few jugs of one of my most requested cordials, cherry brandy, when Jenna came over. Now all the girls had put me on a kind of rotation of visitation. I was never allowed to spend a full week without one of them dropping by to make sure I was still eating and not allowing myself to rot on the couch. While there were more than a few times I felt like doing just that, I was still a father and I still had responsibilities to my girls. A fact my wife pounded into my head until the day she passed.

Well I was doing my thing and Jenna was talking to me about how I was doing, what I was thinking of doing, and what kind of new mixtures I was researching. The thing is she was doing it almost from rote instead of it being her usual banter. Something was bothering her and I figured I needed a taste tester to help me assure flavor and such. She began her sampling and began to relax for the first time since she got here. Nothing like a little 70 proof cherry flavored heaven to loosen the old tongue. While she sipped she talked. “Hey dad, How do you make this stuff so smooth?” I topped off a shot glass for her. “Well I use a nice aged brandy, lots of dried dark cherries, and a stick of real cinnamon to bind all the flavors together.” She shook her head. “I can’t even taste the spices.” I nodded. “If you could taste it then it would be cinnamon brandy and not cherry.”

I asked her how things were going and she tried to act brave, but she was just tipsy enough not to do it fast enough that I wouldn’t catch it. “Things are great dad, just great.” Yep something was wrong. “Is Rob treating you good?” she nodded while looking at her third shot. “I couldn’t ask for a more loving, and patient, man besides you daddy.” Uh oh. Daddy was the keyword for pain in my book. Dad, father, and even Terri were normal, but daddy meant there was something extremely emotional happening. When any of the girls were stressed out, scared, hurt, or had something great going on they called me daddy. From her face alone, she didn’t just win the lottery so this was a warning sign.

I put my hand out to her and she looked at it for a moment before she took it. At first she just put it there like a dead fish, but something about the physical contact made her suddenly grip it tight. “Jenna, all of you girls know you can fool your old man most of the time.” She looked up at me and her eyes were looking larger and wetter. “But when you are in pain, you can’t lie to my heart and you know it. I am your father, you are my daughter. My heart has beat with yours since your first breath and that is a bond that is unbreakable. So stop lying to me, and to yourself, and talk to your old man.”

Well Jenna was never one to be overly emotional and I expected her to open up to me sooner or later. She topped off her small glass, then tossed it back all at once, and set the glass down. She took a deep breath and when she looked at me tears were starring to flow. “Can we go sit on the couch?” She stood up, grabbed the bottle, and we went into the front room. When we sat down I held her hand in mine and waited till she had her mental ducks in a row. “Daddy, things really are great with Rob and I, but we hit a wall and we can’t do anything about it. I have been trying desperately to find a way but there isn’t.” I nodded. “Rob and I have been working desperately to start a family. We went to the docs and they tell us we are both perfectly healthy adults and there isn’t any reason we can’t. I got it going good, he has healthy wigglers, and for some reason they aren’t getting together.”

She looked at me and tears were sliding down her cheeks. “For three years we have taken pills, went on diets, tried every logical thing, and a lot of stupid shit from the net, to start a baby in this useless body of mine and it’s not working.” Her tone had gone up till her voice cracked. “I want to have a child and Rob can’t give me that. He has given so much, but he can’t give me my heart’s greatest desire.” She sobbed. “And it’s not just me. Rob is so broken hearted because it’s his too. When we were first engaged we would talk about our love of kids and the desire in both our hearts to fill a home with love and kids. He wants what you had daddy, he wants to be a father like you with a house full of screaming, fighting and loving children.”

Then she sighed in resignation. “We want our children to be created out of love, not a lab. We talked about adoption and things but ... but there is no reason to we shouldn’t be able to have our own. I keep thinking, and something tells me Rob is feeling it too, that we should just get a divorce so we can find someone who can satisfy that need.” Her grip had grown tighter through her whole talk, but then it went back to a dead fish. She was giving up. This was killing me on a very deep level because my sweet little girl was giving up. She had never done that in her life. She may accept defeat, she knew when she was beaten, but when she lost she had always stood tall knowing she had done her best. This wasn’t like her. She was giving up and I knew I had to think of something to save her heart and marriage.

She pulled the bottle out of her lap and waved it at me. “Come on dad, don’t make drink alone while I commiserate my desperation and failing marriage.” I took the bottle and put it to my lips. “And no sticking your tongue in the mouth. I remember that trick you taught us so it looked like we were drinking so boys wouldn’t get us drunk at parties.” Even a little tipsy my sweet girl could read me like a book. I took a real pull and gave it back. As she sat and talked about how the foundations were already crumbling she had me get a little more sloshed than she was.