IT DIDN’T seem strange until much, much later – but at precisely 1:30 p.m. on Father’s Day, phones rang simultaneously in three Long Island homes.
Denise Ford picked up the receiver at her house in Long Beach, and put kids Harry Jr., 12, and Gerard, 10, on the line.
“Happy Father’s Day!” the boys called out to their dad, Harry Sr.
At that moment, Anne Downing answered the phone in Port Jefferson. Seven-year-old Joanne and brother, Michael, 2, issued a Father’s Day greeting to their dad, John.
At the East Rockaway home of Mary Fahey, the 1:30 call went slightly differently.
“I love you,” Mary simply told her husband, Brian.
No one, at that moment, had the vaguest clue what these casual conversations really meant.
They were all saying goodbye.
“It was God’s way,” Denise said yesterday, smiles and tears alternating in her soulful blue eyes.
Just an hour after each man phoned home, Queens firefighters Brian Fahey, Harry Ford and John Downing arrived at a blaze in Astoria. It seemed a “good” fire. Nothing they couldn’t handle.
Then, without warning, an explosion. It robbed three good men of their lives, three women of their husbands and soulmates. And it left eight children waiting – to this day – for their dads to come home.
I sat yesterday in the snug kitchen of Mary Fahey, an energetic comet of a woman, to whom laughter comes easily.
“My husband said, ‘If you see the fire chief at the door, I’m dead,'” Mary said. “I knew as soon as they knocked on the door. I locked myself in the house, screaming at the top of my lungs.”
For Anne, who appeared the most fragile of the group, it was all a blur.
“One minute, you’re talking on the phone. The next you’re in a helicopter,” she said.
“I kept thinking, ‘I want to get to the hospital to talk to him. To hold him.” By the time she got there, he was already gone.
Denise said she was walking on the Long Beach boardwalk recently, and reached out for Harry’s hand.
“I expected to be with Harry for the rest of my life,” she said.
Mostly, the women worry about the children. How can you explain to a 3-year-old why Mommy can’t stop crying? That Daddy is in heaven? That it’s forever?
Thirteen days after Brian died, June 30, was Mary’s 40th birthday.
She wasn’t exactly alone. Brian, a careful planner, had already bought her a present, a beautiful gold necklace.
“Love your husband,” she said. “Just like that, it can all be gone.”