My father was the kind of man who remembered everything about the people he loved.
He remembered that I liked the crusts cut off my sandwiches until I was nine, and then I didn’t, and he remembered that too. He remembered the name of every teacher I had from kindergarten through senior year, the ones I liked and the ones who had made things difficult and the one in seventh grade who told me I was not a math person, which my father had disputed at length at a parent-teacher conference I was not supposed to know about but did. He remembered the date of every school play, every cross-country meet, every thing that mattered to me, and he showed up to all of them, arriving slightly out of breath and always in the second row because he said first row made teachers nervous.
His name was Daniel. He went by Dan to everyone except me, and I called him Dad, which is obvious, but I say it because the word had a specific weight in my life that it might not have in others. He raised me from the time I was six, after my mother left and did not come back in any meaningful way, and he did it while working as an electrician and keeping a small apartment on the third floor of a building on Clement Street in San Francisco and making sure I had, as he put it, everything that mattered and some things that didn’t.
I was his only child.
When I was thirteen he started dating, something he approached with the careful uncertainty of a man who had been alone long enough to have forgotten how not to be. Most of the women he went out with were pleasant and brief. Margaret arrived when I was fifteen and was different from the others in the specific way that people are different when they have decided, before meeting you, what role they are going to play.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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