He shoved my face into the birthday cake I had spent three days baking for our son. His girlfriend started filming. His mother folded her arms and said, “Finally.” Out of thirty-five people in that Nashville backyard, the only one who ran to me was my five-year-old.
By three o’clock on a warm Saturday afternoon in September, the backyard in southwest Nashville looked exactly the way a five-year-old boy would have wanted it to look. Blue streamers fluttered from the low branches of the old pecan tree. Dinosaur plates were stacked at the end of a folding table. A plastic T-Rex piñata…
