DIED 2018
I HEARD THE STORY of The Babydaddy before I met him, from the mother of one of my fourth-grade daughter’s friends. She had briefly dated a man twenty years older than she; they broke up because he already had a bunch of troubled kids and an expensive ex-wife, while she had a ticking clock. Shortly after she met someone new, she learned she was pregnant with the older man’s child. Surprisingly, her new suitor urged her to keep the baby and volunteered to raise it with her. This was the guy I knew as the little girl’s father. While The Babydaddy had been tetchy about the plan at first—new support payments just as he was beginning his retirement—he ended up quite in love with the last addition to his family. They spent every Sunday together for many years.
In eighth grade, the girls went on a trip with their Spanish teacher to Peru and parents were allowed to join. This was when I finally met him, a quiet, mostly good-natured graybeard with hair combed back from a widow’s peak, a man of moderate views and conservative habits. Then I learned he actually had two daughters on this trip, the other a packet of cremains in his suitcase. His eldest, dead in her forties of an overdose. Half of her went into the Pacific at Lima, and the other half almost didn’t make it to Machu Picchu, as heavy rains kept us in town for an extra day. Then the gods relented.
His tall silhouette and his daughter’s small one, hiking up to the Temple of the Sun.
That was the last I heard of him until the girls’ senior year of high school, when I got a call asking for photos that might be used at his memorial. At seventy-two, he had collapsed on a staircase, already dead when he reached the bottom. He didn’t drink, he hadn’t been ill—in fact, in his sixties, he’d become a gym rat, convening daily in the sauna with his retired cronies. I found two pictures of him in Peru. One bravely trying the local fermented corn drink, the other opposite his daughter at a long table in a restaurant. She in an orange beanie, looking wide-eyed at the camera, and he in profile, smiling straight at her.