A/N: This starts off short, but gets longer. It's mostly written already, so updates should be regular. Hope you enjoy.
I was six years old, the first time I met him. My parents ran a laundry in a little town in Florida, and it was August. The air was hot and wet, and he came in just before closing wearing the huge wool coat he wanted them to clean, and the heat be damned. He flirted with my mother, and she giggled like a girl and disappeared into the backroom. He shook my father's hand, and chatted with him in an easy way that was somehow outside of my experience of how grownup men talked to each other, and then he pulled jellybeans out of my nose for me.
He needed the coat the next day, and my father stayed up well past my bedtime fixing it for him. And, you should understand, my father never worked late for any customer- "not even the Governor himself!" he used to say, as a roundabout way of bragging that Governor Collins had stopped at our store on the campaign trail once, and had my father clean his suit and two of his ties.