I’d judged the “Ice Queen” as cold. She seemed odd and unfriendly. Decades later, I learned just how wrong I had been.

My dad, sister and I shivered in an open pod of electric-blue fiberglass near the top of the Ferris wheel at Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park, on a rare, fun day together. The spring air was chilly and damp. 

The big wheel had stopped, freezing us over the slate expanse of Lake Erie, where whitecaps dotted the grey-blue waves.

We were determined to make the best of our Cedar Point day, despite the cool, grey, rainy weather of late spring. I’d flown into Cleveland’s Hopkins airport from Maine that morning for the weekend.

High above the lake and on the stopped ride, we felt the air’s bitter bite.

“Where is this cold wind coming from?” someone demanded to know, as a gust blew through the open car.

“Michigan!” I said, and we laughed, because we all knew I meant the woman who our Dad had lived with for a long time by then. “Where the Ice Queen comes from!”

We shared a big, belly laugh with our dad.

Maybe that was the first time we nicknamed Stephanie the Ice Queen. Or, maybe that’s just the day it stuck.

Magic Coaster Rides

My dad, sister and I had come to this amusement park together at least once before, squealing and shrieking as we rode roller coasters with our arms waving in the air, over and over again until the park closed at midnight. Three kids so high and giddy after a ride that we raced each other back to the line, laughing as we re-buckled ourselves into the first cars. 

Dad always pushed us to ride as close to the front as possible. Metal gears slowly click … click … clicked as we climbed up a steep hill as tall as a skyscraper, our train of coaster cars inching over the peak then plunging us into the warm darkness, sending us sideways around steep banks.

Many years later, the three of us would attempt to re-capture that fun and magic as a last hurrah before our dad’s chemo treatments began, a futile attempt to stop pancreatic cancer. Temps reached 103 degrees that July day, distorting the air above the asphalt of Frontiertown into waves. Hot, miserable and defeated by the heat and our Dad’s prognosis of six months, we left mid-afternoon, retreating to the cool AC of the car for the ride home.

But on that rainy day when we rode the Ferris wheel, none of that had happened yet.

Quiet Mender

I’d known Stephanie for 17 years. I barely knew her and I had not wanted to. We met, as I remember it, the day my grandfather died. My boyfriend drove me over to my grandparents’ modest, post-war suburban house where my dad and his new girlfriend gathered around my grandmother.

Stephanie sat in a wing chair between the front door and the picture window that looked onto the neatly trimmed front lawn, and across the street to the similar houses. She had a pile of cloth in her lap and worked a needle and thread, mending. Or perhaps knitting, pulling on skeins of yarn as she clicked needles and perled. 

By then, I knew my dad’s infidelity had helped break-up both his marriage to my mother and to my stepmom, with whom he’d made a second family. My sister, technically half-sister but we’ve never used that term, is their daughter. 

For the record, Stephanie has since told me many times how she insisted on seeing my dad’s divorce papers before they dated. 

But when we met, I didn’t know that, nor did I really care. I was busy checking out, a senior in high school, eager to leave behind all the twisted dynamics of my immediate family and move away to attend college and make my own life.

Over the years, Stephanie and I had talked a few times. Basic, polite pleasantries. I’d be “back home” in Cleveland for the holidays. Stephanie would be away, visiting her family in Michigan. 

Unfamiliar and Odd

I’d judged her as cold. She was different than women I knew and the moms of my friends. She did not have kids. She thrifted for broken things and repaired them. They were always taking in stray, misfit animals. She seemed so unfriendly. 

I questioned why she, why any woman, would be with my dad. Sure, he was easy to like — handsome, charming, funny. But by then I knew it was difficult to count him as a daughter or wife.

I was so angry at him then.

For several of those years after he and I reconciled, he would drive out to Maine alone to visit, explore Maine and help me take care of my first, old house. Stephanie stayed behind in Ohio, seemingly not interested.

Maybe dad said “Ice Queen” first. Who knows for sure? Lots of people in his family had nicknames. He’d called his own dad “Old Fart.”

But it doesn’t matter who said it first, anyway. I piled on. 

The Ice Queen moniker became less mean over time. At least I hope so. My dad — always an infuriating tease, but you couldn’t help but laugh — called her “Queenie” later, or “The Queen” or he’d drop words altogether, singing instead that bit of music from the Imperial Margarine commercials — “da-da-ta-DOOOO!”— when a king’s crown pops onto the kid’s head.

Discovering True Nature

When I moved to central Pennsylvania, Dad, Stephanie and I visited more often, spending Saturday afternoons together, eating dinners together. I started to get to know her better.

And when my dad was in crisis — in a medical coma for two weeks — all of us, including my sister, were forced to work together and really get to know each other. We took shifts at the hospital to give each other a break. We chatted beside his bed as he slept. In-between visiting hours, we ate meals together in the hospital cafeteria.

Stephanie laughed with us. She didn’t get angry or bitter or mean. She was afraid to lose him, stressed and vulnerable. I saw her in a state of being overwhelmed, but never saw her treat anyone unkindly. Rather, I was just beginning to realize how she helped smooth out my Dad’s rough edges.

I learned she really, truly loved him. She would have done anything just to get him back home again. He survived the infection, woke from the medical coma that had both saved his life and forced him to miss Thanksgiving, and spent several weeks in a rehabilitation facility to regain his strength.

By Christmas, our Dad was back in his favorite chair at their home, with his Bassett hound and all of their dogs and cats. Two months later, he and Stephanie hosted our first Thanksgiving in February dinner.

They kept visiting Central Pennsylvania over the next couple of years. We talked about art, gardening, animals, food and restaurants. I leaned heavily upon my Dad and Stephanie when my marriage fell apart.

On one visit during “divorce year,” Stephanie helped me finish painting the walls of my living room and dining room a gorgeous, burnt orange. I’d seen a picture of rich, deep smoldering orange walls with white trim and a dark hardwood floor in an issue of This Old House magazine. Had to have that color. Just had to.

“I hate this color, you know,” Stephanie said, as she brushed it onto the wall. “Yeah, I know,” I replied.

My Patron Saint

Once, I was at their house, helping weed Stephanie’s garden and spotted a headless statue of St. Francis of Assisi, about 3-4 feet tall, with his head nestled into the soil beside it.

“Ummm… what’s up with the statue? We can glue the head back on,” I asked Stephanie.

Oh no, she said. “Everyone has a statue of St. Francis with his head. Why would I want that?”

I started to understand. It struck me: Stephanie’s gift is to see beauty in the broken — an exceptional gift to my dad, our family and to me. All of us broken.

I began to think of her as “Saint Stephanie – the Patron Saint of Broken Things.”

One truth at the core of my family’s Thanksgiving in February story: My dad had broken all of our hearts, and he was terribly broken himself. Yet, we all loved him, and he loved us.

Stephanie turned out to have one of the biggest, most loving hearts of anyone I’ve met. Over time, I realized she was the woman who absolutely, unconditionally loved my dad. She accepted him for exactly who he was — mood swings, erratic driving, un-ending projects, infidelity and all. It wasn’t pretty. In her shoes, I would not have stuck around. Surely, none of it was easy. But she loved him.  

Stephanie loved him into being a better man. This, I believe, helped he and I to mend our relationship. In time, it helped our family become more functional and loving. The real heroes of our family Thanksgiving in February dinner were the women — my mom, my stepmother, and Stephanie.

Reconciling the Past

I’ve apologized to Stephanie for calling her the Ice Queen. We’ve talked many times about it. It can’t be erased. She was gracious. Surely, the nickname had to hurt.

Now, I’m a stepmother to two young men. If either of them had called me “Ice Queen,” I may have simply vaporized. Yes, I would have been devastated.

My dad has been gone almost seven years now. Stephanie is a beloved part of our family, who every February cooks up a batch of jalapeno bacon poppers and makes a long drive out to the wintry woods of central Pennsylvania for our Thanksgiving dinner. Our crowd gobbles up the poppers, and I remember our common thread, for she is the only person there each year who knew my dad. We both miss him at the table.

To me, she will remain a quiet mender of people, animals, and torn sweaters — of most everything except St. Francis in the garden.