My mom took me back to Chicago a couple times to see him, and he agreed to come to Michigan for my seventh birthday in August. This was a big deal, as he’d never come to our house in Michigan before, and I was very excited.



The day we were supposed to pick him up at the train station, I was wearing coral-colored shorts and a white sleeveless button-front shirt. My grandma French-braided my hair. “You’ve gotten so big since the last time you saw your dad!” she said to me.

“Yeah, maybe he won’t even RECOGNIZE me!” I said.

“Oh, I think he’ll recognize you,” she responded. She put a yellow bow at the end of my braid.

When the train arrived, we waited for him to step off. We waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, my mom asked someone if she and my grandma could walk through the train to look for him. They did; he wasn’t there. When we got home, I called the number I had for him at the time, but he didn’t answer.

In October, he finally called. He told me he had missed his train on my birthday and felt so bad that he couldn’t bear to talk to me, which was why three months had gone by. I don’t remember what I said to him. I probably said, “It’s OK.”

I remember my mom taking the cordless phone out on the back porch to talk to him, and I remember catching the phrase “THREE MONTHS.” I also know that she told me it wasn’t OK, and that she was very angry. I remember being in my bed and her holding me in her arms as I sobbed about him.

The same year I turned 7, I really, really wanted The Jolly Postman from my class book order, and after bugging my mom about it, she — the woman who never received a dime of child support, who was, at this point, working minimum-wage jobs to support us, and who had every right to be angry about the fact that she couldn’t buy me this book — said, “Why don’t you ask your father for the money?” For whatever reason, I still blindly trusted him, so I did: I called him and asked him to buy the book for me.

The Jolly Postman is one of the items I’ve always had in the mental log I keep of all the gifts he’s ever given me. The same year, he went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and sent me a big package of gifts including a tiny bottle of perfume, some unused soap from the hotel bathroom, Mardi Gras beads, and a pretty stuffed doll that I named Sweetie Pie and slept with every night.

