“Don’t curse. It sounds ugly coming out of such a pretty mouth,” my dad chastised.
I groaned and looked up at the ceiling, counting to ten under my breath. It was something Jasper and I taught ourselves to do when the bullies at school would make fun of us for having two dads and two moms, and later when Jasper came out officially freshman year of high school—the only openly gay boy in our small school at the time.
“Izzy, I met Catori before I met your dad. You know I dated both women and men in my early twenties. That is, until I met Casey and my heart exploded. I knew then and there that man would be mine for eternity. He was a puzzle piece that I was missing in my heart. It clicked in place and it’s been him ever since.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’ve heard this story a million times, Papa. Get to the part about my mother,” I demanded.
“Catori and I met when she was separated from her husband. He was a military man and always deployed overseas. Catori was like the wind. A free bird flying from one destination to the next, forever in search of the meaning of life.”
I pulled my legs up onto the couch and sat cross-legged. Jasper followed suit but stayed close, a hand clutching my thigh at all times.
“I met Catori at an arts festival in downtown Chicago. Next to you, Isabeau, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. A hundred percent Native American. Long black hair all the way down to her bum. Lithe, curvy body and a siren’s smile that could light up the world. And she did, your mother. Every man, woman and child in her path was mesmerized by her beauty, her laugh, her kind, accepting nature.”
I smiled, imagining what she might have looked like when Papa got up and went to our built-in shelving unit. He stepped on a stool and grabbed a marble box from the top shelf. It was about the size of a small shoebox. It had been sitting on that shelf in this house for as long as I could remember.
He opened the box and pulled out a stack of pictures. He handed me the top one. It was my papa, younger by twenty-five years, smiling wide, his dark hair long enough to reach his shoulders.
“Your hair!” I chuckled and showed the image to Jasper. “You looked like an artist.”
He smirked.
In my papa’s arms was a stunning beauty. The woman he spoke of. Catori. My mother. Black hair with dark eyes to match. Her skin a darker shade of brown than my papa’s. Though her cheeks, nose, eye shape and definitely her smile I’d have recognized anywhere—they were the same as my own. Also, the same as the two women who showed up today.
“Catori was part of a belly-dancing crew that was performing in the area. Our eyes connected, we partied, got to know one another and became intimate. She stayed in the city for a month until her dancing group planned to dance their way across the nation, ending in New York. It was a magical month. We lived, we loved, we were carefree. Before meeting Casey, and having you, it was the best time of my life.”
His head fell forward and he focused on the ground. “Only we were too carefree. After she left to move on to Indiana, I got a call. She told me that she was pregnant. I freaked out. I was so young. Hell, we were both so young. And I knew what we had was indeed love, but it wasn’t the type of love you build a life on. It was kinship. Seeing yourself in another in a way you relate to and enjoy for a time. We could never have been together long-term.”
“Then what happened?” I asked, imagining how freaked out my young papa must have been.
“For months we discussed our options at great length. That’s when I found out that she planned to go home to her reservation where her one-year-old daughter was being taken care of by her father.”
“She left Evie with her dad?”
He nodded. “Catori wasn’t like anyone I’d ever known. She was the wind. A free spirit not meant to stay in one place for long. It wasn’t her destiny.”
“Then she should have taken birth control,” I grumbled.
Jasper snorted and then pressed his lips together.
“Be that as it may, she convinced me that our child would be best raised by her and her husband, Adam. They were reconciling or whatever it ended up being, and she wanted to raise the baby with her husband on the reservation. I was barely twenty-three. A foster kid with no family of my own, and no one to turn to for help. I was going to college part-time and working part-time as a mechanic. I lived in a basement of an older lady’s home that she rented to me for cheap because I did all the yardwork and took out the trash. I had nothing to give a baby or Catori, so I let her do what she thought was best.”
My dad put his arm around my papa’s shoulders. “You did the right thing at the time, Ian. She had support. An older husband, a family on the reservation and another daughter.”
“Every day of my life I regretted not being a part of Suda Kaye’s life. Then a year later I met Casey and he changed my world. Older than me by seven years. Had his shit together when I was still scrambling to make ends meet and finish my schooling. We got together. I moved in with him and within a short time we were married. A year later, when he was in his early thirties, Casey was ready to start a family. Which is when I told him what happened with Catori and Suda Kaye.”
My dad kissed my papa’s jaw and pressed his forehead to his husband’s. “And I understood, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted a child to raise with Ian. Wanted him to have a home and a family the likes of which neither of us had. We contacted an agency and hired a woman who used donor sperm and her own egg to undergo in-vitro fertilization.”
“Oh, my God!” I lost my breath.
He nodded. “And it worked, too. Ian and I were so happy. We were going to be a family. A real family. Not just by marriage but with a child of our own.”
A swell of sadness coated the air as I closed my eyes, knowing the next part before either one of them could utter the words.
My dad Casey continued. “She became pregnant but when it was time to give us the child in the hospital, she refused to hand over the baby. Said it was her blood and she’d take us to court to keep her child.”
“Did she? Take you to court?”
He nodded. “At first, yeah. We’d paid almost twenty thousand dollars between the in vitro and her surrogate fee. None of which we ever got back. The attorney’s fees alone to fight after those initial meetings would have been astronomical and stripped us of every dollar we had at the time.”
“Which is when I hired a private investigator to find your mother. It wasn’t hard. I knew her full name and the name of the man she married. I also knew she lived on a reservation in Oklahoma or Colorado.”
“Why did you contact her?”
His expression was tortured. “Because I’d given up my daughter and we’d just lost our chance at having a family. I was angry, hurt, destroyed, over losing that opportunity twice. Catori listened. Consoled me. Was heartbroken for both Casey and me. Understood what it meant for me to give up having Suda Kaye in my life.”