“Cold, Lindsay?”
The pale girl nodded. She shivered beneath the itchy covers and turned a page of the magazine she was holding in her frail hands. But the words were meaningless. Lindsay could not read, despite her age of ten years old.
Father looked at her. “You want to learn how to read, Lindsay?”
Her soft blue eyes looked up. “Yes.”
“Come sit on my lap.” She did.
Father began. “Do you know what words are?” he asked.
“Yeah, they are a string of letters separated by spaces.”
“How many words on these two pages?”
Lindsay stared at the magazine and counted the words. It took twelve minutes until she came up with the total.
“Five hundred forty-two.”
“Recite the alphabet for me, Lindsay,” Father suggested.
“A, B, C, D…”
“Can you write those letters?” Father asked.
Lindsay sniffed. “No.”
Father got up and rummaged in his old trunk behind the piano. He brought back several newspapers. He found a particularly large headline and circled an A with a red ballpoint pen.
“Draw that,” he says, and puts a sheet of graph paper in front of Lindsay.
“But,” Lindsay stared, “I don’t want to write. I want to be able to read.”
Father did not blink. “If you can write, Lindsay, it makes reading a million times easier. You need to be familiar with the letters.” He passed the paper to her.
Lindsay drew a crooked A on the graph paper.
“Good,” Father said. “Now there are two versions for each letter. Lowercase and uppercase.”
Then Father circled a lowercase a and Lindsay drew that too.
Through the night, Lindsay and Father went through all the letters in the alphabet.
“So the vowels are a, i, e, o, u and sometimes y. No matter what word it is, every word needs a vowel,” Father added after Lindsay drew a Z.
Father taught Lindsay what the words sounded like.
“The a makes an ah or an ay sound, as in apple or aching. The b makes a buh and bay sound like boat and baby. The c makes a cuh and suh sound such as cake, and cell phone…”
Lindsay spoke the different sounds for every letter, and gave some ideas of her own.
“Okay, we’ll play a game,” Father declared. “We’ll go through the order of the alphabet and you can say a word for each letter. Whoever gets stumped loses. I’ll go first. Alien.”
“Branch.”
“Cat.”
“Door.”
“Elephant.”
Lindsay stopped. She couldn’t remember what the next letter was in the alphabet.
Father smiled. “What do you call me?”
“Father!” Lindsay cried. Father sat back and laughed.
“Goat.”
They went back and forth the whole night until Father decided it was time for bed.
“We’ll continue tomorrow night,” he promised to a miserable Lindsay.
“I want to keep going,” she sulked.
“So do I,” claimed Father, “and as soon as I get back from work tomorrow, we’ll start again.”
Father stacked the papers on his small desk, and crawled in beside Lindsay on the queen bed. He was asleep within minutes.
Lindsay waited for the sound of deep snoring. Once she heard it, she knew her father was asleep. Silently, she crept out from beneath the covers and reached for the papers on her father’s desk.
She took the newspapers and studied every letter. She started putting them together, one letter at a time.

Father woke with the sound of screaming. He jumped out of bed only to find Lindsay holding her graph paper full of letters.
“Look, Father!” she shrieked. “I’m writing WORDS!”
He looked with groggy eyes at her sheet. “What did you write?”
“I wrote my name, see?” Lindsay said proudly. She pointed to a single word decorated with flowers and hearts and fluttering birds. LINDSI. Father smiled and crossed out the I and replaced it with AY.
“There,” he announced. “Perfect.”
Lindsay did not go to school that day. She refused to go and there was no way that Father could make her. While her father was at work, Lindsay was writing words and learning how to read. She wrote her name over and over. She filled a sheet of graph paper, and then another one. In no time, she had filled twenty sheets of graph paper with words. Her favorite one was LUCKY. She said it over and over to herself as she wrote it. “Lucky Lindsay, lucky Lindsay…”
When Father got home, the floor was littered with graph paper. There were sheets covering the desk. There was graph paper in the covers of the bed. Pages and pages of graph paper were stuffed in the closet. Lindsay had covered enough paper with words to rebuild the Eiffel Tower out of paper. Father stood there, staring at the papers that covered his house.
Lindsay looked up as he walked in.
“Father, today I wrote thirty thousand words!” she cried. Lindsay gathered up all her sheets and presented them to her father.
He took them and read each one, including her name that was written fourteen thousand three hundred twenty-nine times.
“Lindsay, I’m going to write you a story, and you are going to have to read it, okay?” Father said.
Lindsay shivered with excitement. “Okay.”
Father took a long time to write the story. Lindsay didn’t know exactly how long it was, but she knew that it took long enough for her to write her name one hundred fifty more times.
Father handed his story to Lindsay. She took long enough to finish reading it as Father took to write his name five hundred sixty-seven times.
Lindsay finished reading it in her head, and read it out to Father.
Father smiled. He grabbed both of Lindsay’s hands and twirled her around in the air.
“We did it, Lindsay!” Father cried. “You can read!”
To brighten the moment even more, Father gathered all his work’s savings and took Lindsay out for chocolate ice cream.