Bunny

Bunny only gave you two things in life: a gap-toothed smile and a bad hairline. When you can finally afford it, you’ll fix the former. Two years of adult braces, old-school: brackets, bands, wires—all working in unison to string together what look like PEZ candies tacked onto the front of your teeth.

As for the latter, the hairline that was once as straight as a tightrope, you won’t be old enough to drive when it first says fuck you. By college, the hair will be gone, erased from your life like a bitter ex-girlfriend. And over time you’ll wonder, as you do with Bunny—the father whose DNA gifted you this tragic genetic fortune—if the hair was ever meant to be there at all.

Your mom said it best: Bunny went from pillow to post. Woman to woman. Migrated with the seasons like the animal he was.

For her, this was fine, at least in the beginning. “We weren’t supposed to be serious,” she once told you. “I liked to dance, and he did too.” And later, after your first middle-school dance where Victoria Morales grinded against you to a song off Now That’s What I Call Music! 19, sometimes, reluctantly—and shit, somewhat strangely—you couldn’t help but think about how those linkups between Bunny and your mom might have gone down. The two of them rocking like dinghies in the ocean.

“Our spot was a club called Sticky’s,” she told you then, marking your height against your bedroom doorframe. “And it was just my luck that I ended up stuck with Bunny for life.”

At the time it seemed like a random thing to bring up. But then she guided you to the living room window, where the two of you stood for a while, taking in the fall leaves. And though you couldn’t see them, you could hear children laughing from the daycare center down the street, a laughter that floated in through the open window, lodged in the front of your mind, and stayed there.

And then Bunny’s green Chevy Astro creeped up, squeaked to a halt. “Do you see that man?” your mom said, pulsing your hand in hers like a barely beating heart. “Getting out of that green truck?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Bunny. That’s your dad.”

You were eleven when your mom introduced you, and it was the first time you heard that word—dad—in relation to you.

You understood what a dad was, of course, what a dad was for. A few weeks earlier you’d sat in the back row of Ms. Williams’s class while she played a sex-ed video for the fifth-grade class. Some kids giggled; others slept. You listened, though not with the same reverence as when Mikey, who lived next door and was only a year older, told you about going down on his uncle’s girl.

“You like it?” you asked.

“What you think?” he grinned.

Which is all to say: You weren’t no dummy. You knew where babies came from, and therefore, where you came from. You’d always had a father whether you knew him or not, whether you’d met him or not. But because of your mom and the team of men she’d recruited to be around you—coaches, your godfather, Uncle C (who wasn’t really your uncle but your mom’s best friend from college, and who managed the McDonald’s nearby)—you never felt a dad’s absence. Not really.

Only when made aware of it by other people or circumstances did you remember what you lacked. Like when your best friend, Georgie, said to you in a fight, “At least I got a dad.”

And you responded, “At least I know who my real dad is.”

And c’mon, what’s there to say after that? Georgie avoided you for days. No daps. No pounds. Side-stepped you like dogshit. You felt bad about it—truly, truly did—not only because Georgie was your boy, but because Cano, Georgie’s stepfather (well, really Georgie’s mom’s boyfriend, with his combed back, prematurely white hair), was like a father figure to you too.

Still, even more than that, as you walked home having said what you said, remorseful and thinking, thinking, thinking—as you always did, as you do now, because you don’t so much live in your head as bounce around in it—you knew that what you’d said to Georgie didn’t feel half as bad as the thought of Bunny as your dad. This man you barely knew! This man who chose to barely know you! Like most things in life, the body knows first, and yours rejected the word—dad—spat it out like spoiled milk. You felt it before you knew it, and it was then, in that moment, you decided to never use that word for Bunny again.

Let’s be clear: Just because you decided to no longer bless Bunny with that special title, it didn’t mean you avoided him altogether. You saw Bunny all right. Your mom made sure of it, as best she could.

If you’re honest, it’s not like you weren’t curious about the guy—what he did for work…where he lived…why he never stuck around. Part of what piqued your interest was that you recognized your physical self in him: the bridge of his nose, his heavy eyes, the gap between his two front teeth, so far apart you’d think they were beefing.

The resemblance came to you as a shock, an unwelcome truth you weren’t quite sure what to do with as he stood in front of you on your stoop with his dirt-stained boots that threatened to track the carpet in your mom’s apartment, right before he crossed the threshold from the outside world to yours. From stranger to, well, family.

Growing up, friends, neighbors, and even randoms on the street would see you next to your mom and comment on how the two of you looked so much alike. Your mom, who since the mid-eighties had kept her hair short. Your mom, who went to the same barbershop as you and who held her own with the men there, talking shit about draft picks or the crook holding public office or the blockbuster that was currently in theaters (which everyone had already seen on bootleg DVDs hawked by the guy who stopped by the shop each week).

But two things can be true at once. And as your mom’s girlfriends often said about this nigga—a word that, growing up, you were forbidden from using, but which you, while dragged to cookouts, Long Island Ice Tea parties, and one-on-one hangs, would come to learn was specifically reserved for them to identify low-life, ain’t-shit men—this nigga, being Bunny, couldn’t deny your genetic similarity if he wanted.

He looks like me, you thought—not, importantly, I look like him, and this pleases you.

Tallied up, you visited Bunny more often than he visited you. It wasn’t until much later that you’d learn the man was sick by the time he popped into your life, that he had been for a while. Kidney disease, then kidney failure, which, by the time you were seeing him on the regular, led to dialysis appointments three or four times a week over at Hartford Hospital, where you were born.

On weekdays when you visited him during his sessions, your mom, after getting off work, would snag you from the apartment and bring you to the hospital.

It smelled like death in the hallways. Fluorescent lights—cancer lights, you called them—beamed down on Bunny in his curtained-off section of a room packed with patients. His chair was so big it made him look younger than you, thirteen now. A tube plugged in his arm filtered the blood you had in common.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” Bunny said during one visit.

“Let him be,” your mom said.

“I was speaking to my son,” he replied, and the room tightened. You knew your mom was holding back from snapping back.

Around that time, her patience with Bunny was thinner than a pair of ’90s eyebrows. The night before, you’d overheard her on the phone with your grandma. Being curious, you lifted the phone in the living room, took it off its hook with the stealth of a thief in a museum.

“He owes that boy,” your mom said.

“He’s sick,” your grandma countered. “How does it look to take a sick man to court? How does that look in the eyes of the Lord?”

“The eyes of the Lord?” your mom balked. “The eyes of the Lord apparently saw all those years of neglect, right? The Lord knew Bunny had a son, and that the motherfucker couldn’t be bothered to check and see if the boy had a roof over his head or food on his plate.”

“But he does. He does have a roof over his head and food on his plate. He’s got enough love for two sets of parents.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Patience,” your grandma said. “You gotta trust in Him.”

“Trust in Him,” your mom said, leaning into it. “Trust in Him. Listen, if I left my trust in Him or any other man I’d be waiting forever.”

There was more, like bits about other children Bunny actually cared for. But it was the line about waiting that surfaced in your mind as Bunny and your mom squared off in silence, in that cold, sterile, aspirin-colored hospital room, the incessant buzzing of the lights like an itch you couldn’t reach.

You had waited, like she’d said. Too long, really. And whether out of solidarity with your mom or retribution on your own behalf, you decided that Bunny would now be made to wait. You’d speak when you were ready.

Being silent wasn’t hard, but words came eventually, during sporadic visits and rides in his truck.

The first time you rode with him, you looked for clues that betrayed a truth or two about Bunny. A lighter that told you he smoked, or a CD revealing his taste in music. The first thing you noticed was the medieval-looking knife, which he clarified was in fact a machete, which he kept tucked under the driver’s seat, its blade sticking out like the tip of a tongue.

“Just in case,” Bunny said.

“In case of what?”

“I need it.”

You spent these trips at diners. The ones peppered along the Berlin Turnpike, slipped between the motels you’d learn from one of your mom’s issues of Vanity Fair contributed to the sex trafficking that once plagued the strip. At the counter, where Bunny always chose to sit—as if sitting next to you was easier than sitting across from you, since sitting across from you meant having to look you in the eye—you answered basic yes-or-no questions.

Do you have friends?

Yes.

Do you have a girlfriend?

No.

Do you play sports?

Yes.

Are you good?

No.

If you asked him anything, you don’t remember it now. Around that time, you were hardly sleeping, your memory of those days is pocked with missing bits and pieces of time. The migraines were what kept you awake, throbbing and pulsing and laying claim to the right side of your head. You could almost hear the pressure behind your right eye, screaming.

Perhaps it was stress that caused them—stress from Bunny’s sudden presence, the tease of his actual existence. When you were able to fall asleep, you woke up grasping for the teeth you dreamed had fallen out. Stress dreams, your therapist called them, but only years later, after your girlfriend, Tati, encouraged you to see one.

One thing you do remember is how those outings with Bunny would end once he took you home. Sometimes with money in your pocket, but most times not. Sometimes with a hug, but most times not. But always with a slack look on his face, the curl of his smile disconnected from the dead air behind his eyes as he uncommittedly told you he loved you.

You never, not once, said it back.

It was Jules, your half-brother, who told you more about Bunny’s job. You were fifteen and had heard Jules’s name over the years, and more often by your mom than by your shared father.

The day you met, Bunny was scheduled to take you to the outlets nestled along Connecticut’s coastline for end-of-summer school shopping.

With Jules, there was no guessing—not about who he was or his relationship to you. He called you brother, all while stepping out of Bunny’s truck, unfolding legs that seemed to extend forever. After a hug that swallowed you, Jules placed his hands on your shoulders, holding you there at arm’s length, and scanned you from top to bottom.

“You look good,” he said, as if it’d only been a few months since you last saw each other.

At the outlets, Bunny handed you a fistful of bills. He went one way. You went another.

“Mind if I join you?” Jules asked as you walked away, and though you didn’t say so, you did mind—the feigned closeness, fake depth of familiarity, plastic kinship.

But it wasn’t all bad. Jules was older, by almost a decade, and walking from store to store he told you more about Bunny than the man himself ever did. Where he was born. That he worked mainly in construction. That you had one more sibling, a sister who, though grown, still lived with her mom because of your sister’s disability.

The day ended with your mom and Bunny fighting—again. Nothing you had bought was suitable for school. “A waste,” your mom said to him, in between heavy coughs, which you noticed had become more frequent, more pronounced.

What was it that she wanted? Bunny asked, and though it might have seemed that her comment was about the money you blew, what she really meant was time between father and son.

But before that, and at Jules’s suggestion, Bunny had stopped at Lenny & Joe’s, a fish joint on the Long Island Sound. The air was tinged with the smell of salt and fried clam strips. Bunny ate in the truck, in a parking lot next to the large mass that is the Madison Beach Hotel, while Jules and you sat outside, looking out into the distance, where at some point the Sound met the Atlantic Ocean.

“Hey,” Jules said as the sun melted into the horizon, the water lapping the rocks below. “Bunny doesn’t give us much, but it doesn’t mean we can’t give each other more.”

Remember those coughs? The persistent hacking that interrupted conversations and shared meals? That sounded more violent with each eruption? That made you ask your mom if she needed water, and she said no? That made you ask if she should see a doctor, and she said no? That showed phlegm? That eventually showed blood? That eventually led to shortness of breath? That eventually led to sleepless nights? That eventually, at seventeen, made you drag your mom in the middle of the night into the passenger seat of her burgundy 2000 Chevy Malibu to the hospital? She’d had that car for as long as you could remember, the car you rode in to school, to karate classes, to Cub Scouts, to Boy Scouts, to the mall, to the movie theater with friends, to the movie theater for your first date, to your first high school job, to driver’s ed classes, to your driver’s license test, and now, to the hospital. The same one where you used to visit Bunny. Where he had recently gotten a call to let him know they’d found a kidney for him. Where they performed the transplant surgery. Where he made it out seemingly unscathed after years of waiting. Where you and your mom waited and waited and waited in the emergency room for someone to check her out. Where after a night of tests, going home and coming back, and back and forth again, days later, in a doctor’s office humming with those same dreadful overhead lights you remembered from your time spent with Bunny as a kid, your mom, once again holding your hand like the day you met Bunny—though this time with a firm squeeze, a grip, a lock (no pulsing, but laced with fear)—and you received the news that your mom was indeed sick. That she had cancer. That, given its stage, there wasn’t much time left.

This was in your senior year of high school, at the private day school in West Hartford, where you had only a partial scholarship and because money never sat still in your apartment, passed through like the weather, each academic year was harder to pay for than the last. Instead of focusing on where you’d be headed after graduation, you did what you felt you had to do: You took care of the only person who ever took care of you.

You cooked and did the laundry. Drove her to clinics, sat in cold rooms. Tracked pills, refills, and co-pays. And the bills? They bred overnight. Electric, water, insurance. You lined them up on the kitchen table at night, deciding which to feed and which to starve.

“You keeping up with your grades?” your mom would ask.

“Yeah,” you’d say, and though you both knew this was a lie, the topic ended there.

Your migraines returned, as did the stress dreams. The ones where your teeth fell out, usually one by one, like dominoes, each one triggering the next. If you were quick enough, you could spit them out and catch them. But more often you weren’t, so that the teeth fell—dripped, really—into your mouth, choking you until you coughed yourself awake.

“Did you get back to Jules?” your mom asked you one morning, and you thought she had phrased it wrong.

“Did I tell Jules?” you corrected her. You had. Surprisingly, he was one of the first people you talked with about your mom’s condition, and in the end you regretted it because you knew he’d tell Bunny. You’d have preferred to do it yourself. That, and you couldn’t help but to think back on the conversation you’d eavesdropped on years ago, the one where your grandma had insisted your mom give Bunny grace even as he shunned you again and again, and all because, at one time, he was the one who was sick.

After he left the hospital, new kidney in place, nothing changed. You heard from him twice—once to ask you to pick him up on the day he was released, because no one else could, or would; and the second time to ask about your mom, to see, as he put it, how she was holding up.

“No. Did you get back to Jules?” she said again. “It’s your birthday,” she added with a smile, reaching for your hand.

You had not. Shit, you hadn’t even remembered the day, your birthday. Your eighteenth. And even though your mom was slipping more and more, her body shriveling, her mind was still sharper than the tools in Bunny’s truck.

Of course she knew the day and, of course, knew that Jules would’ve reached out to you—like he did for every birthday and holiday and significant life event that warranted a traditional family check-in—and that you’d be slow to respond, or wouldn’t respond at all. And yet, as your mom reminded you about every holiday and birthday and significant life event, you were family, and that’s why she made sure you got back to him. And by the new year, he’d be one of the few family members you’d have left.

Why rehash it? To this day, small things trigger you. The squelch of an automatic hand sanitizer, like the one at the hospital. The whirring of a fan, which sounds an awful lot like the drone of the adjustable bed your mom used in her final days. You hear them and you’re there again.

Grief, love, grief.

It remains, changes, remains.

What else is there to say?

After the proceedings—your mom’s funeral, the paperwork, the stream of condolences—you finished up your last few months of high school. You skipped plenty of classes that final semester, turned in assignments occasionally at best. Did just enough to pass final exams and walk at graduation, though you didn’t even feel like doing that much.

“Why wouldn’t you go?” Jules asked a week before the ceremony. You were at his apartment, waiting for an order of fried rice and wings and whatever else his family would get from the Jamaican–Chinese restaurant nearby.

“Not like they’re going to give me my diploma, anyway.”

Days earlier you’d been notified that you had an outstanding balance on your tuition, which triggered a hold on the diploma until the balance was paid. No one in the audience would know, of course, but when you crossed that stage and shook the headmaster’s hand, the folder he’d be handing you would be empty.

But after a week of peeping yourself in the mirror in your cap and gown, laughing about how your mom would want so many photos of you in this getup, you decided to go—for her, for Mom. And when your name was called, you could hear your crew: Coach Dave and Uncle C, Cano and Jules—and even your mom, if only in your mind.

Afterward, you found Bunny in the parking lot, leaning against his car as if he had nowhere to be. The last time you’d seen him was at your mom’s funeral, where the only thing he’d offered was a hug.

“You could stay with me,” he said by way of hello.

You didn’t answer him at first, considered your choices. You were an adult—in age if not in temperament—and life was coming at you fast: bills and bills and more bills, most of which were your mom’s—debt collectors hitting your line like they needed a fix. Covering the rent for your own apartment wasn’t an option.

“Okay,” you said to Bunny.

One year, you said to yourself.

Your mom never spoke badly about Bunny, at least not in your presence. “You can decide how you feel about him,” she once said. By then, what you felt for him wasn’t anger or hate. It was nothing at all, just a lack of feeling, or so you thought.

You put most of your shit in storage before showing up where Bunny lived—a long-term motel on the Berlin Turnpike. It suddenly made sense why you two had always had so many meals there when you were a kid, why all the waitresses and cooks and groggy truckers seemed to know him. He’d been bouncing from one long-term motel to another for years.

The room smelled of smoke and bleach, had two twin beds with sagging mattresses and thin, stained bedspreads. A small nightstand sat between them, scarred and cluttered, while a dusty TV was bolted to a wobbly dresser. He gave you the bed closest to the window. “I like being near the door,” he said. You dropped your bag on the bed and found the one window open, just a crack to breathe some life into the room. Bunny muttered something about having to be somewhere and then was gone.

Stranded, no car, you stretched out on the bed and wondered if this was a good decision. You and a nomad. You and, well, Bunny.

Hours later he walked in with two grease-soaked bags from Wendy’s, and you knew it was the one in Newington, off the Turnpike, across from Villari’s, where you’d made it all the way to a brown belt in karate. He held out a greasy bag and you grabbed it, and the two of you ate in silence, each man propped at the end of his bed while the faint drone of traffic along Route 15 seeped in through the window.

“You’ll work with me,” Bunny said. “I’ll pay you eventually. That’s the arrangement. Can’t just stay here for free. You’re a grown man.”

It took a lot for you to hold your tongue. After all, you are your mother’s son, and who exactly did Bunny think he was? It’s not like you asked him to stay there—in fact, you never asked him for anything. Not then. Not yet. And despite what you told yourself when Bunny first offered to host you—because that’s what it felt like, as if you were the plus-one to a friend of a friend’s gathering, a stranger in someone’s home—you did indeed have other options. You’d always known this.

But that was part of it, right? You’d chosen to be here—with him, and for reasons you weren’t quite ready to admit. And so, instead of cutting him down, or grabbing your shit and leaving, you stuffed your mouth with another bite of Spicy Chicken Sandwich and kept your opinions to yourself.

“You didn’t grab anything to drink?” you said.

The weeks were scattered—three motels in three months, the next one not too far from the last. In that time, you’d become a kind of apprentice, assisting Bunny with his work, which you learned was inconsistent. Long droughts. No projects. No money.

But he was skilled. Shit, he was an artist.

“The dining room table you ate from in your mother’s apartment?” he once said on the drive to a gig, “I made that.” He could make dressers, cabinets, desks, chairs. You wondered if he was simply bragging, or if it was a way to get you to open up. Or maybe it was to shame you because of the handyman you weren’t. Couldn’t tell the difference between a wrench and pliers.

Those first three months, that whole summer, Bunny never paid you, but you showed up regardless. Sweating in basements and attics and backyard sheds, unclogging pipes, laying roofs. These jobs made you smell like shit, look like shit, feel like shit, and since you got no money from Bunny, you took a second job at one of the McDonald’s Uncle C ran. He’d gone from store manager to area supervisor, overseeing three franchises, including the one in Hartford where you’d dash in between visits with your mom and Bunny’s dialysis appointments. Where you worked the fry station for a whole summer. The one where, later, you finally asked out Tati.

The first time you met Tati was at her house, that three-bedroom she shared with her sorority sisters, not too far from the UH campus. They were all there when you showed up.

One of them had called because of a leak in the bathroom. Bunny had done some work at that house before. His number was on the kitchen wall, just in case, and when something broke as new sisters cycled through, he got the call.

When the two of you showed up that day, you learned quickly that the girl who’d called had undersold the situation. Yes, there was a leak. What she failed to explain was that the leak consisted not of water, but of shit. The sewage system was blocked and any time they flushed the toilet, any toilet at all, anything that went down came back up through the tub, oozing slowly through the drain like meat through a grater.

“I’ll go down,” is all Bunny said when he saw it.

The crawl space door was hidden in a closet in the hallway. Despite being slightly bigger than you, Bunny squeezed his body through and down the hole. You passed him the necessary tools and waited upstairs while he went to work, checking routinely for a change in the flow of water through the sink and toilet.

“I ain’t never seen shit like this before,” Tati said. “And I mean that figuratively and literally.”

You laughed from where you sat on the edge of the tub, looking to see if said shit had stopped regurgitating up the drain when you flushed the toilet. When you looked up, you saw her standing in the doorway, a small brown-skinned girl with a cloud-like birthmark mapped on the right side of her face.

“You good?” she asked, pinching her nose.

You coughed, said, “Yeah. Just the smell.”

She smirked with eyes closed, avoiding the scene.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said, before adding, “It’s Tatiana, by the way.”

The blockage was worse than Bunny had thought. Roots had grown into the pipes, and items other than just toilet paper were tangled in the system, clogging the whole thing. After cutting through them, Bunny needed to semi-flood the basement, let everything out. The cleanup called for a snake-like hose to run from the main floor down into the crawl space, slowly vacuuming the water up to avoid mold. It was your job to visit occasionally, to go down the hole, like an Alice in Wonderland of the hood, and check on the progress of the water before finally sanitizing the main floor. You’d catch Tati now and then during those inspections, trading niceties when it felt appropriate to do so. The same age as you, Tati hailed from the Bronx, which in her opinion, people-wise, wasn’t so different than Hartford. She was studying psychology, with plans of becoming a therapist.

“How about you?” she asked the day you came to finally collect the equipment. “You in school?” She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d judge you either way. But the shame washed over you.

“Taking a break,” you said, avoiding eye contact, winding up the hose. “I plan to get back to it soon.”

You finished gathering everything and loading it into Bunny’s truck, and like he had you do with other clients, he sent you back to Tati’s front door to tell her to call if any additional problems came up. So you did, and Tati attempted to make small talk, but you breezed over it. Maybe ego or shyness—but instead of flirting with her like the girlfriend she could be, you shook her hand like the client she was. Instead of investing in a future, you stayed stuck in the present.

It was a couple weeks later when you heard her laugh. One that sounded like a stutter, partial and loud. It was almost closing time, and you were making your way to the front of the restaurant.

“Let me get a double with cheese,” she said between giggles with friends.

What would be worse—her discovering you weren’t in school or knowing you worked here? You doubled back to your cramped little office, checked yourself in the small mirror hanging on the back of the office door, took a brush to the patchy beard you’d been growing since your mom passed. Two swipes each pit of deodorant. A dollop of lotion rubbed into the crevices of your ashy hands.

With a false air of ease, you headed out to the counter, enveloped in the odor of hot grease.

“I got this one,” you said to the skinny kid at the register, and turned to Tati: “What else can I get you?”

“Now you got questions for me?” she said. “Now you can speak?”

Her girls eyed each other, hands over smiles. Were they laughing at the situation, Tati putting you on notice, or the yellow M stitched to your hat?

“Hello?” Tati said, drumming her painted nails on the counter.

“Can I take you out sometime?” you asked, abrupt but confident.

Tati looked back at her friends and they nodded in a way that only they would understand. She turned back, crossed her arms and shifted her weight onto one leg.

“I guess so,” she said, rolling her eyes before winking at you.

“I’ll call you,” you said, since you already had her number from the work you’d done at her place.

Her order came out in a paper bag already sweating through. She took it without looking at you, though still smiling, and was gone. After the door shut behind them, you stood there longer than necessary, hands empty, heart thudding like you’d just outrun something. As if you’d found something.

Any other night you would’ve taken the bus home, but Bunny had a gig nearby and, surprisingly, offered to grab you on his way. When he pulled up, you were still on a high from talking to Tati, sitting on the curb in the glow of the McDonald’s sign.

On the way home, Bunny pulled up to a spot on Maple Avenue, across from Goodwin Park. Bunny unbuckled his seat and tapped your leg with two knuckles.

“Come on,” he said.

You didn’t recognize the house. Bunny rang the doorbell and a woman answered wearing house slippers and a cheetah print headscarf wrapped around loose locs (that one stray loc draping down her shoulder and settling on a chest that seemed larger than your head). She took in Bunny with her eyes and then leaned to the side to grab a glimpse of you.

“This him?” she said.

Bunny grunted, made a move past her and into the first-floor apartment.

“I haven’t seen you since you were this big,” she said, her hand gesturing just below her waist. “It was only a picture, but still. Anyway, I’m Tracie,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

How did she know you? Why would Bunny have shown her your picture? Waiting for a glass of water, you noticed the pictures on walls, a girl who resembled Jules among them. A girl who resembled you.

“I assume Bunny hasn’t told you about your sister,” Tracie said when she returned.

“He hasn’t.”

“Typical shit,” she said, and for a moment you thought about your mom. How she would have responded the same way. You shifted in your seat. “Sorry, it’s just—you’d think he’d want all his children to have a relationship. Or at least know about each other. Come.”

Tracie led you through a long hallway and to the back of the house, stopping at the den. There you saw Bunny, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, feeding the sister—a woman now—you never knew.

“I’m actually trained for this,” Tracie said. “I work at a group home. Doesn’t necessarily make taking care of her easier, but it doesn’t make it harder either. Bunny helps.”

Once again the question of time presented itself. Because, as you once read in a poem in high school, what is time if not how you spend your love?

Your love for Tati grew fast. When you weren’t putting up drywall or caulking a bathtub, you were with her—wandering through bookstores, huddled at a two-top in a restaurant, lounging in bed. Winter, spring, and before you knew it the balm of summer was on you, spending more time in her apartment than in motels with Bunny.

“You should just stay here,” Tati said.

“I’m here now.”

“Don’t play games with me.” Her gelled-down eyebrows narrowed, her freckled nose scrunched. It made sense, in both a loving sort of way and a practical sort of way. One of Tati’s roommates would be going home for the summer. You had some money saved up, enough to cover your portion of the rent and for a few modest dates. Ice cream at A.C. Petersen’s. A movie now and then at Bow Tie Cinemas. Midnight breakfast at Gold Roc Diner.

“Okay,” you told her.

“Respect” is what Bunny said when you gave him the news later that night, right before he took a call in the bathroom.

It took just a couple of days to get settled in. And after a summer of living together, you were certain there was no other woman in the world for you. Tati, the eldest daughter of parents from the DR who’d scrabbled a life together. Tati, who was on track to finish college a year early. Tati, who made you feel whole in a way you hadn’t felt since your mom passed.

It’d been one year since then, and though a fresh semester came knocking, you were slow to answer. Between working with Bunny, working at McDonald’s, and working on your relationship, you neglected working on getting back to school. It was late fall when Tati reminded you of the application deadlines. You were on it, you promised her. You’d already decided on schools, secured recommendations, written your essays. You told Tati all this to her assure her that you were focused, told her all things except about that outstanding high-school tuition balance holding you up, which was more than you had saved up, more than you could imagine asking to borrow to make up the difference.

You considered asking Uncle C or Cano or Georgie. Despite his impending divorce and the cost of raising two kids, Jules would give you the money if you asked. But none of these options felt right. So you settled on Bunny. He owed you in more ways than one.

It had been weeks since you’d seen him. After you moved out, you stopped working with him. You left him voicemails about the money and he didn’t answer. You texted him about the money and he didn’t answer. Silence. Not a word. You borrowed Georgie’s car to try and track him down, diner to diner to diner. Motel to motel to motel. Nothing and nothing and nothing.

You eventually spotted his truck parked in front of where your sister lived. That truck you’d first encountered as a kid, paint job scratched, tires worn. All the time you’d spent in that truck and how it had led to this, waiting for Bunny to come out of the house rather than going to ask for him yourself.

When he did emerge, you called out to him, but he didn’t stop walking.

“Bunny,” you said again, as he got into his truck.

“Bunny,” you said again, as you knocked knuckles on metal.

“Bunny,” you said again, as he rolled down his window.

And in the seconds it took for the window to be low enough for you to see his cold eyes, the stern set of his mouth, and the machete in his hand—the thing Bunny said he kept in case he needed it— it hit you, and with the strangest clarity, that despite all the years of pain he’d put you through, it had never crossed your mind that you might be the reason he’d need it. That in so many ways you both had always been waiting for the other to make the first move.

He never did give you the money and you never spoke to him again, though, to be fair, Bunny did try to reach out. He called, texted. (The first time was months after that night he threatened you, well past the deadline for the tuition.) Vague voicemails, cryptic texts, and it was never clear why, exactly, he was reaching out. For as long as you’d known him—if you could even say you knew him at all—he was never one to apologize. You saw his name, ignored it. Eventually he stopped.

A year, then two…five years passed. In that time, you enrolled at Wesleyan, subsidized by Uncle C. Graduated, got braces. Applied to law school. Got into law school. Would later settle on family law. More seasons came and went. You rode out storms, embraced the calm with Tati by your side. Eventually you proposed and she said yes. Eventually she’d suggest therapy, and you’d say yes. Sights set on becoming the man Bunny wasn’t, with higher stakes once you learned you’d be a father.

It was Jules who confirmed that Bunny had crashed on the Berlin Turnpike. You’d seen it on the news, recognized the truck before you recognized what it meant.

His transplanted kidney had begun to tank. His body rejected it, and without another one, the toxins built up. The fatigue deepened. The kind of exhaustion that makes your hands feel a second too slow, your eyes move a second too late.

By the time he got behind the wheel that night, his body was already failing him.

“305,” Jules said on the phone.

“Miami?” you half-joked.

“His hospital room number. In case you want to visit.”

You never did get around to it.

You did go to his funeral, though. You were late because therapy had run longer than usual, rare because your therapist was such a stickler with her time. The conversation had taken turns you hadn’t quite expected. You’d talked about Bunny, of course, because your therapist knew what day it was, and after she affirmed it was the right decision for you to go, after you discussed what closure meant, and after she asked what you might say if called upon to speak, the night you met your sister came up, how on the drive home Bunny told you about how he and your mom had tried to make things work.

You were just a baby still. They only lasted a few months before your mom ended it. “She said I wasn’t serious,” he told you. “That hurt. Shit, I was embarrassed. I was mad. She thought she was better than me, you know, the way I came up. The way I lived. No diploma. Nothing steady. That’s what I thought, anyway.” His face looked flushed in the red of the stoplight. “I can see what she meant now, but I was young then, and I was so angry I doubled down. Slept out, slept around. Only made it worse. I even wrote her a nasty letter and let all that shit out.” Staring up at the light, he let a short laugh slip out. “She never even got it. Wrote the wrong fucking address.”

The light turned, washed you both in green. “I’m sort of thankful for that, though,” he said, and his body shifted as he pushed on the gas. “If your mom had gotten that letter, you and me…” he trailed off.

At the funeral, sitting in the last pew, you closed your eyes during the prayer readings. Hummed along to the hymns. Winked at Jules’s daughters, your nieces, when they turned and smiled at you from the front pew.

You heard your name called, jumped slightly at the sound of it, even though you’d seen your name in the program. Whether you wanted to or not, the time had come to say something.

You pressed Tati’s hand, made your way to the podium. Felt your skin sticking to your shirt, shirt sticking to your blazer. You knew this was coming, yet you didn’t have a single word ready, and if any words were there, they were slipping away through your sweat.

Would it be right to be honest about him? What would that even mean? What would it mean to them, to you?

You gripped the lectern and looked out at the scattered few who’d come out to pay respects to this man you knew as Bunny. And though you weren’t ready to forgive him, you were trying to understand him, and as you tried, faces seemed to gather in front of you: Bunny’s and Tati’s. Your sister’s and Jules’s. Your mom’s and even your own.

And what came next wasn’t so much you saying something as it was listening to yourself say it, saying Dad, even though you still weren’t sure what the word meant. Even though you knew that on most days, but not all, neither did Bunny.