My boyfriend of thirteen months heard about my daughter on our very first date, built her a bench with his own two hands, and the moment she opened the door to him he dropped the cake with her name on it and said, “I can’t ever be in a room with her again.” Then he asked me a question nobody in my family knows the answer to.
I don’t bring men around my daughter.
I decided that the week the divorce went through, when Catalina was three and still asking where Daddy’s toothbrush went.
So Sameer got the rules on our first date, over pho at a place by the interstate in Fort Wayne.
“I have a little girl,” I said. “She comes first. If that’s a problem, say so now and I’ll pay for my own soup.”
He laughed and said he’d always wanted kids.
He never pushed. Not once in thirteen months.
He came over on the weekends she was at her dad’s. He saw her room, the plastic horses lined up on the windowsill, the drawings taped crooked to the fridge.
In March he built her a reading bench for under that window. Pine, painted yellow, a C burned into the lid.
She thought it came from Grandma Pamela. I let her.
Then on a Saturday in October I decided he’d earned it.
I made enchiladas. I put Catalina in her green corduroy dress and did two French braids that took four tries because she kept twisting around to ask if he was here yet.
“Is he tall?”
“Pretty tall.”
“Taller than Daddy?”
“Sit still, bug.”
All afternoon I talked him up. That he fixed furnaces. That he was the one who made her yellow bench.
Her mouth fell open at that part.
By six-forty she was standing on the couch cushions watching the driveway.
The doorbell went at six-fifty-two. There was a dead moth stuck inside the porch light glass that I’d been meaning to get out since July.
Catalina beat me to the door.
She yanked it open with both hands and said, “Are you the BENCH man?”
Sameer had on the blue button-down I liked. He was holding a white bakery box with a little plastic window in the lid, and through it I could see her name piped across the top in purple. CATALINA.
He looked down at her.
And his face just emptied.
The box tipped. It hit the welcome mat corner first and folded in half.
He didn’t pick it up.
He looked at her like she was a truck drifting into his lane. Then at me. Then back at her, at the way she squinted up at him with one eye shut, the way she does when she’s shy.
“Sameer?”
He took one step back onto the porch.
Catalina was already squatting over the box. “It’s okay,” she said. “The frosting’s still good on this side.”
I sent her to wash her hands. She went slow, looking back the whole way down the hall.
Sameer had the porch rail in one fist. He held it like the porch was moving under him.
“Who’s her father?” he said.
“You know who. Aidan.”
“Danielle.”
“What?”
“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t do that to me.”
Nobody knows. Not my mother. Not Aidan’s mother, who still tells people at church that Catalina got the Mathis chin.
Aidan and I tried for two years.
Then a doctor in a beige office told him why it was never going to happen, and on the drive home he made me swear nobody would EVER find out.
I’d kept that for seven years.
“How would you even—” I said.
He pushed the heel of his hand into one eye.
“In grad school I was broke,” he said. “Ramen and plasma broke. There was a clinic out by the hospital. Ninety bucks a visit.”
My stomach went to water.
“Half the guys in my program did it,” he said. “You don’t ever think…”
He stopped.
“Sameer, that doesn’t mean anything. Do you know how many men—”
“She has my mother’s face, Dani. She has my MOTHER’S face.”
Down the hall the bathroom faucet shut off.
“WHAT WAS THE NUMBER?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
It’s on a folder in a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet, under her first-year albums. Five digits. I read it so many times in that beige office I should’ve had it tattooed on my arm.
“Danielle. The donor number.”
“I don’t know it by heart.”
That was the first lie I ever told him.
He knew it, too.
He looked past me at the yellow bench through the front window. I watched it land on him.
“I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t ever be in a room with her again. I’m sorry.”
“So that’s it? Thirteen months and you walk?”
“If I stay, I’m going to say something in front of her I can’t take back. Go look at your paperwork, Dani.”
He went down the steps.
He got in his truck and sat there almost a full minute without starting it.
Then he did, and he was gone.
Catalina came back with wet hands and saw the empty porch.
“Did the bench man not like me?”
I told her he got sick. I told her that while I scraped purple frosting off the mat with a spatula.
She ate her enchiladas. I couldn’t.
At ten-fifteen, after she was asleep, I got the stepladder and brought down the shoebox.
The folder was right where it always is. I had my thumb under the flap when my phone lit up on the dresser.
Sameer.
“Don’t open it yet. It might not be mine. My BROTHER went to that clinic first, and you need to hear what he did to the last family that found him.”
Ten-sixteen
I didn’t open it.
I sat down on the closet floor with the folder across my knees and called him. He picked up before it even rang on my end.
“His name’s Khalid,” Sameer said. “He’s three years older than me. He’s the one who drove me out to that clinic the first time.”
“What did he do?”
“A woman in Toledo did one of those spit tests on her boy. Khalid came up as a match. He found out where the kid played Little League, and in the middle of a game he walked onto that ball field by first base and told a nine-year-old he was his real dad.”
I had the flap still bent back under my thumb. I let it go.
“Then he called the mother and told her what it would cost for him to stop coming to games. Five hundred a month. She paid it for a year and a half.”
“How do you know all that?”
“He told it at my mom’s on the Fourth of July like it was a fishing story. That’s the last time I talked to him.”
I could hear his blinker going. He was still driving around.
“Dani. Did anybody in your family ever have her spit in a tube?”
Lake James
Sameer has one picture on his refrigerator. I saw it the second weekend I went to his apartment, stuck under a magnet from a muffler shop.
Two boys on a dock in swim trunks, the water behind them the color of tea. The bigger one has his arm hooked around the little one’s neck. The little one is squinting up at the camera with one eye shut tight.
“Lake James,” Sameer said. “That’s me. Khalid called me Popeye till I was twelve.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Lima. Ohio.” He opened the fridge for the milk and the picture swung away with the door. “We don’t really talk.”
That was all I got, and I didn’t push. I had a shoebox of my own. I knew what it was to keep a door shut.
The other thing came back to me on the closet floor, and it came back all at once.
Last Christmas Pamela gave everybody the same present. A little box with a plastic tube inside and a picture of a globe on the lid.
“For the family tree,” she said. “Mathis is Irish all the way back, and I want it on paper.”
Aidan put his in his coat pocket. I left mine on the counter by the cheese ball.
When I came back from the bathroom, Catalina was standing on a kitchen chair working up spit, and Pamela was holding the tube under her chin.
“Grandma says I have to fill it to the line,” Catalina said.
I didn’t say a word. I told myself those kits sit in junk drawers for years. I told myself Pamela can’t remember her own Facebook password from one month to the next.
“Pamela did one,” I said into the phone. “Last Christmas. On Catalina.”
He was quiet so long I took the phone away from my ear to see if the call had dropped.
“Go see her in the morning,” he said. “Not a text. Go look at her face when you ask.”
I put the folder back under the first-year albums and shut the closet door.
The rooster clock
Pamela lives on the north side, in the house Aidan grew up in.
Sunday at eight I left Catalina next door with Becky, still in her pajamas, and drove over before church.
Pamela was in her navy suit with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair. There’s a clock over her stove shaped like a rooster. It runs four minutes fast and has since 2009.
“You’re early,” she said. “Is Catalina sick?”
“The Christmas kits. Did you send hers in?”
She poured me coffee I didn’t ask for. “Those came back in February. Mostly German, if you can believe it. Drink that before it gets cold.”
“Pamela. Did you send hers in.”
She set the pot down on the wrong burner. Then she went to the drawer under the phone and got out her tablet and put it in front of me, already open, like she’d done it a hundred times.
Catalina’s school picture was at the top of the screen. The one with the missing tooth.
Under it was a list of names, the people Catalina matched.
Pamela wasn’t on it. Aidan wasn’t on it. Nobody named Mathis was on it at all.
“I’ve known since February,” Pamela said. “I looked at that every night for a week.”
“And you still tell everybody at church she has the Mathis chin.”
“She does have it. She has it because I say she has it.” She took her glasses out of her hair and folded them. “Aidan doesn’t know I know. He’s not going to.”
“Then delete it. Delete her whole profile. Today.”
“You think I didn’t think of that?”
She reached over and touched the little envelope at the top of the screen.
“It’s too late for deleting,” she said. “There’s a man. He wrote to me in April.”
Seven money orders
The man’s name on the site was KD419.
Over his name it said Close Family, and under that, 1,742 cM shared. I didn’t know what that meant. I took a picture of it with my phone anyway, because my hands needed something to do.
His first message was polite.
Hi Pamela. I believe I’m this little girl’s biological father. I’d love to be part of her life. I’m only about two hours away.
His second one came three days later.
Or we can talk about what it’s worth to your family for me not to be. Church people talk. Grandma posts a lot of pictures.
Pamela got up and brought back the tin recipe box she keeps by the bread. Behind the card for pecan pie there was a rubber-banded stack of money order stubs.
Three hundred fifty dollars. April, May, June, July, August, September, October. All to the same post office box.
In Lima, Ohio.
“I took it out of my Christmas club,” Pamela said. “Is Lima supposed to mean something to you?”
I didn’t answer her. I took a picture of the top stub, too.
I called Aidan from her driveway with the engine running.
He listened to all of it without saying anything. Then he said, “How much does he want?”
“He’s been getting three-fifty a month from your mother.”
“So pay him. I’ll go halves. Dani, you swore to me. In the car. You swore.”
“Your mother’s known since February.”
He went quiet. I could hear a TV on his end, a game.
“Then she knows,” he said. “Fine. So pay him, and nobody else ever has to.”
He hung up before I could say anything back.
I sat there and scrolled the pictures I’d taken. There was a third message I’d missed, under the other two.
It came Thursday night. It said what time her school lets out.
Page three
Sameer came over Monday after Catalina was asleep. He parked down the street, not in my driveway, and knocked instead of using the bell.
We sat at the kitchen table. The yellow bench was right there through the doorway, and he sat with his back to it.
I showed him the stubs first.
When he got to Lima, he put the phone face down on the table and kept his hand flat on top of it.
“Three-fifty a month,” he said. “From a grandma. He got cheap.”
Then I showed him the screen from Pamela’s tablet. Close Family. 1,742 cM.
He turned my phone sideways and looked at it a long time. Then he picked up his own phone and typed something and read for a while with his lips moving.
“A parent and a kid share around thirty-four hundred of these,” he said. “Seventeen hundred is half that. That’s a grandparent. Or a half brother.”
“Or an uncle,” I said.
“Or an uncle.”
He turned his phone so I could see the chart. Khalid’s number sat right in the middle of the column with Uncle at the top.
“He knows how to read this,” Sameer said. “He’s done it before. He knew what that number said the day he got it.”
“So he’s not her father.”
“No.”
“Then why would he tell Pamela he is?”
“Because ‘uncle’ doesn’t scare anybody into a Christmas club.” He slid the shoebox across the table to me. “Open it, Dani.”
I opened it.
The donor profile was eleven pages, stapled. Six foot one. Brown eyes. Graduate student, mechanical engineering. Favorite thing to do: take apart whatever won’t run and make it run.
Aidan had picked this one. He’d said the engineering part was close enough to him.
On page three there was a boy on a dock, squinting up at the camera with one eye shut.
Pamela’s kitchen, Friday
“That’s me,” Sameer said.
He said it to the picture, not to me. Then he got up and stood at my sink for a while with the water off.
I did three things that week, and I’m not proud of how any of them felt.
Tuesday I drove to Aidan’s apartment and told him to his face that I was telling Catalina. He stood in the parking lot in his work boots and said, “You SWORE, Dani,” three times, louder each time, until a man two doors down came out on his balcony.
Wednesday I called my mother. She said, “Oh, honey,” and then she asked if Catalina was okay, and that was all she asked.
Thursday I sat in Pamela’s kitchen with her tablet and wrote to KD419 from her account.
Come get it in person. Friday, 4:00. My house.
He wrote back in under a minute. Smart lady.
He came at four-twenty. He had Sameer’s shoulders and more weight in his face, and an Ohio State cap he didn’t take off in the house.
“Grandma,” he said to Pamela. Then he looked at me. “And you’re Mom. Okay. Look, nobody has to make this weird.”
He sat down without being asked.
“Five thousand and I go back to Lima, and I’m a name on a website. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. I’m not a bad guy. I just know what I know.”
I put Pamela’s tablet in front of him with the number on it.
“You’re her uncle,” I said.
He looked at it and laughed. He had a nice laugh. That was the worst part.
“Okay, so you Googled. Good for you. You know who knows what a centimorgan is? Nobody at First Methodist. I say father, they hear father. I stand at the fence at three-ten, she hears father. You think a six-year-old reads charts?”
“I told her dad. I told my mother. I’m telling Catalina Sunday.”
“No, you’re not.” He turned to Pamela. “Grandma, she’s bluffing. Tell her what your church ladies are going to say when—”
“She’s not bluffing.”
Aidan was in the hallway door. I hadn’t heard him come in through the garage. He still had his work boots on.
“I’m sitting next to her when she does it,” Aidan said. “Mom, how much did you give him?”
“Two thousand four hundred and fifty,” Pamela said.
Khalid didn’t look at either of them. He was looking out the front window at the curb, where Sameer’s truck was parked behind his.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” he said. “That’s my baby brother’s truck.”
He went out the front door. I went after him.
Sameer was standing on Pamela’s walk with his hands in his jacket.
“Ten grand,” Khalid said. “And she never hears your name from me. I drove you out there, Popeye. You owe me a ride.”
“She’s going to hear my name from her mother,” Sameer said.
“And Mom? You want me to call Mom?”
“I called her Wednesday.”
Khalid stood there a second. Then he got in his car and backed over the edge of Pamela’s mums and didn’t stop at the sign.
Sameer watched him all the way to the corner.
“I can’t be both things to her, Dani,” he said. “You know I can’t.”
The porch light
The second Saturday in November, Sameer brought his own stepladder.
He unscrewed the glass off the porch light and held it up to see. The moth was still in there, gone flat and gray.
Aidan and I told Catalina on Pamela’s couch, the two of us on either side. A doctor helped. A kind man gave a piece so she could get made. Her daddy is her daddy.
She wanted to know if the kind man liked horses. Aidan said probably.
Pamela still goes to church. She doesn’t say anything about anybody’s chin.
Sameer comes once a month now for supper and leaves before her bath. He doesn’t kiss me at the door. We decided that in his truck, and it was my idea, and I’d make it again.
Catalina came out on the porch in her socks.
“Is that from July?” she said.
He tipped the glass and let the moth fall into her hand. She looked at it a long time with one eye shut.
“Bench man,” she said. “Can I keep it?”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who has kept a promise longer than they should have.
For more complicated family twists, read about the daughter who became the driver in “Dad Handed Mom His Car Keys in April”, the surprising bond behind “Our Son Calls Her Aunt Ren”, and the painful wedding moment in “I Still Carry Mom’s Old House Key”.
