I guess I've got a talent for finding people, even people I don't know much about. I'm not going to pretend to be the next J. Edgar Hoover, by any means, but I'm up there when it comes to Tulsa's most notorious coke dealers, and my finger's on the pulses of near everyone involved in the shadier side of things around here. As it turns out, Miss Sheila Caldron— Caldron, Jesus, I didn't even know her last name— used to get personal, door-to-door deliveries of dexedrine from us, which makes it depressingly easy for me to show up at her fourth-floor-walkup apartment. Suppose the seventies are starting to die, and the hippie era right along with them.

Even as I knock on the door, I'm trying to tell myself that it probably ain't my kid— the mantra of every deadbeat everywhere, but one I can't stop myself from repeating. Sergio's a semi-notorious shit-stirrer, and unless he got real up-close and personal with her, there's no way he wasn't spinning some of those details of just how much this little girl is my spitting image— the fuck was he doing with these hypothetical binoculars, birdwatching? Hell, it might've not even been Sheila at all, how good a memory can he possibly have of a woman's face he glimpsed five years ago?

She pulls it open after the third knock and it's her. She's changed her hairstyle, gotten one of those Farrah Fawcett cuts that are real popular now, and she's wearing red bell-bottoms and a glittery, low-cut top instead of her old hippie clothes, but I've spent enough time with her face haunting my memory to recognize her in the dark, anywhere. "Can I help you?" she asks boredly, like I'm interrupting something, though I don't hear or see anyone else inside. "Nobody told me about maintenance today."

My face itches, under the weight of the concealer and foundation I used to cover up my tattoo, though it's a tiny dot; I tried to dress casually, but I might've toned it down a little too much, seeing as my jeans are splattered with paint from the time I helped Tim repaint his shed. "Blossom," I say, roll the syllables out slowly as my opening shot— I can see her remember me all at once, her pupils growing wider like spilled ink as she examines me again. "I think we need to talk."

Her skin's drawn tight over her cheekbones like the top of a drum, and her smile is even tighter, closed-lip without a sliver of teeth. There's what might look like an infected zit in the middle of her forehead, to somebody without the experience, one she can't stop picking at, but I can't shake my suspicion that my first instinct was correct— that it's a sore. "What do you think we have to talk about?"

"About the kid you've been keepin' from me, maybe?"

I might as well have touched her with an exposed wire, the way she jumps at that. She grabs my arm, and if I didn't outweigh her by about a hundred pounds, she would've dragged me past the threshold of her apartment. "Come inside, at least," she hisses, "don't just start airin' my business out in the hallway."

Her place is a mess the way the apartment I used to share with Tim was— panties strewn across the floor, along with takeout containers and pizza boxes, a couple beer bottles rolled under the couch. I try to tell myself that she wasn't expecting anyone, before I start sticking my nose up in the air, like Tim didn't used to stick my shit into garbage bags and threaten to send me back home to Ma. Beneath the trash it kind of looks like a witch's coven, crystals everywhere, a rug up on one of the walls, a book called Mastering the Tarot spread out, spine cracked, on the kitchen table next to a half-eaten bag of grapes. Not really much in the way of toys, though, except for a doll wedged into one of the couch cushions next to an empty chip bag. Maybe she's more successful at keeping them out of the living room than Jasmine and I ever got, because we had to give up on that pretty fast.

"I shouldn't have just thrown that in your face, I'm sorry," I say, and I'm a hell of a lot more conciliatory and steady-voiced than I should be, given the circumstances— but you don't start negotiations with accusations, that ain't how it works. I shove a potted plant to the side and sit down on the couch; let her stand above me, have the position of power. "But I heard from a friend of mine... I mean, he came to me with the craziest story, that he saw you walkin' around town with a little girl who looks just like me. That true? Is she mine?"

"The kid I'm keepin' from you?" Her voice corrodes me like battery acid, when she starts to speak. I deserve it, the words she's whipping out at me, but that doesn't make it easier to take. "You did everything short of aimin' a shotgun at me, told me that you were married— why would I assume you wanted to know about her, exactly?"

She wasn't so bitter back when we first met, though I suppose she didn't have much to be bitter about, before life knocked out some of her airy naiveté. Maybe that's just what I do by nature, take these vibrant women and leach all the goodness out of them, like squeezing juice out of an orange slice. "That's my daughter," I say uselessly, like that means anything. Like she didn't assume right, about most men in my position. "Of course I'd want..."

"It was still illegal, then," she says, twists a tissue paper flower from the coffee table in her hands until it's all wadded up. "And I was just too scared besides— one of my girlfriends died in high school that way, septic shock, you know? So I'm sorry I didn't tell you, if you wanted to pay for me to get it done, but I wasn't going to go through with it no matter what."

I always thought abortion was wrong, hell, it sounds like close to the most fucked up thing you could possibly do— I mean, killing babies? Darry wanted Jasmine to get one too, when he found out that she was pregnant with Mike, practically begged her to— like I wasn't fixing to marry her. I don't know what makes me seem like I'm enough of a pussy ass coward to pay some butcher—

But would I have? The thought gets inside my head and I can't extract it so easy, like someone poured syrup right inside my skull. If she'd come to me, a few weeks after it happened, told me that I'd knocked her up and that she needed to make this go away, would I still be standing on those smug moral convictions a lifetime of Catholicism gave me? Or would I have patted her on the head and asked Luis about somewhere I could take her, somewhere discreet and clean—

All of this could've been tied up, neat and clean, no loose ends. The living proof erased like it never existed at all. And for about the worst second of my life, I wish—

"What's her name?" My voice sounds hoarse when it finally comes out, deprived of oxygen. I lace my fingers together, squeeze them tight like I'm trying to break my knuckles. I need to hear it, something to make her a real little person and not just a hypothetical.

"Danielle— Danielle Marie." She starts ripping bits of crumpled-up paper, lets them fall onto the floor like snowflakes. "It was popular, year she was born, it was in one of my baby name books... guess I didn't think about it that hard. And every lil' girl around here's middle name is either Marie, Elizabeth, or Mae. So there you have it."

I guess I'm lucky it wasn't Meadow or Brook, the way she named herself back in the day. I wouldn't change it, to be honest, even if I had been consulted— I wanted my kids to have names from the Bible, which is part of why Mike ended up Michael and not Patrick, though that also just seemed like a bad omen at the time. Daniel, Danielle, it's pretty, and now there's an image already starting to form in my head, though I have no idea how accurate it is. "You got a picture of her somewhere?"

There's one on the mantle over the fireplace, which smells like she was burning sage in there, and when I see it for the first time— man, I'm not going to cry, not here and not in front of her, but the back of my throat pinches so tightly shut I find it hard to breathe for a second. I don't need to ask for no paternity test, that's my daughter, on a scooter on a sunny sidewalk, a helmet dangling from her chin. She's got dark curly hair that falls down to her elbows in tangles, though it's lighter than Mike's by a few shades. The narrow structure of Sheila's face, with her small, ski-slope nose, but those are my eyes, and they lance right through me as I look at her. I'd recognize her anywhere, at the end of the world. "You should've told me," comes out in another long exhale, as I turn it over in my hands. "I would've paid— I would've been there."

What did she ever tell her about me? I'm sure she must've asked, at some point, realized she didn't have a mama and a daddy together like other kids. That she didn't know who I was? That I didn't want her? The truth, that her daddy's a married man making another family on the side? Maybe a lie would have been preferable.

She doesn't say anything, because there's nothing really to say, at this point. What she should've done is irrelevant. What matters is what did happen. "Wait, where is she, even?" I ask— we're discussing someone who's not even in the room, but should be. "At school? Kindergarten or somethin'?"

"She's too young for kindergarten," she says, "she just turned five back in January. My mama watches her, most of the time, she's on disability."

"Most of the time?"

"Curly, I have to go to work, I don't really have time to play twenty questions 'bout Dani," she says, twisting her hair up into a bun in the hallway mirror— it looks more scraggly than it did in my memory, lost some of its lustre and weight. "If you want to see her—"

"Of course I fucking want—"

"If you want to see her," she continues like I hadn't spoken, "you can, okay? I ain't gonna keep you from her. But don't come to see me again. I don't need your brand of trouble... from you or your wife."

I'm imagining all sorts of reactions from Meemaw here when I knock on her door, including calling up five-o— and on this side of town, I haven't bought any officer an all-expenses-paid vacation to Sarasota Springs yet. Fortunately, or you know, unfortunately for her, she looks like she's clinging to life by her fingernails, though she can't be that much older than my own mother, maybe coming on fifty. She's leaning against a walker, her hair hanging stringy and unwashed in front of her face, like the effort of coming up here took up all of her energy reserves for the week. "Can I help you?" she asks, her voice wheezy in a way only a lifetime of smoking gets you. "I don't need another set of encyclopedias, thanks, or any kind of new vacuum."

For about the first time in my life, I'm too tired to come up with a good lie. "I'm Dani's daddy. Sheila says I can see her here?"

She blinks at me twice, then shrugs. "Sure," she says, and gestures me inside, which is actually a lot more casualness than I'd like someone looking after my daughter to show towards strange men. "She never mentioned anything about you, figures. Could've dropped me a line, let me try to clean the house up first."

I don't notice a damn thing about the living room decor once she leads me into it, with her slow, shuffling gait. Dani— my daughter— is wearing pink cotton shorts and a t-shirt with SAFARI JOE'S 1976 across the front, the lettering cracked from frequent washes, her hair cut shorter than it was in the picture. "Hi," she says, and barely looks up at me from the dollhouse she's parked in front of, but that flash of dark blue eyes is already enough to slay me. I stand there, frozen in place, unsure of what to do or say. My first instinct is to pull her into my arms, start sniffing her hair and everything like a lunatic, but I can't; I'm a stranger to her, she'd start screaming bloody murder, most likely. "Have you seen Pete?"

"Who's Pete?" I croak. Some imaginary friend of hers? Did Mike still have them, at her age? Every year of his childhood seems further and further away from the last, an indistinct blur.

"Mama's friend." She struggles to undo the buttons on Barbie's dress with her chubby baby fingers, scrunches up her nose. "He said he'd play school with me when he came home but he ain't home yet. Pete's a trucker, that means he drives a truck everywhere, for his job." She looks up me expectantly, to make sure I get it. "Meemaw won't never play with me 'cause her legs don't work."

"Meemaw has multiple sclerosis, lil' lady," Sheila's mama says as she picks up the TV remote with one hand, a glass of water, cloudy with a dissolved pill, in the other. The Price is Right is blaring in the background. "I got about ten good steps a day, and I have to ration them out, so don't you start whining now."

... Mama's friend, huh?

Yeah, I realize I don't have a leg to stand on here, getting hacked off that the girl I slept with as a married man managed to move on from my dumb ass in the past five years. That doesn't help the surge of primal anger inside of me, that some other guy's been looking after my daughter, playing dolls with her. Did he buy her this whole set-up? Teach her how to ride that scooter? How long's this fool been around, anyway?

That train of thought is derailed when my baby girl nearly shoves Barbie's pink plastic shoe up my nose. "D'you wanna play?" She sounds like she's not about to take no for an answer. "You know how, right?"

"Yeah." I sound like my throat's been rubbed with sandpaper for the past hour. "I have a niece, Neni—" that's what we all call her, Elena's a big name— "she says I'm real good at it." Better than Tim, at any rate, I wear the feather boa and remember all her storylines, which are usually more complex than whatever's going on with Roots that week.

What do I do— what else can I do? I have a million questions for her, a million things I want to know, and I can't bring myself to ask any of them. I sit down on the floor and I play Barbie tea party.

"You said you slept with her once."

Tim looks so ridiculous nowadays, I have a hard time taking him seriously, though he also looks like he wants to reach across the booth right now and strangle the living daylights out of me. Namely, he's decided to not only grow a mustache, but also add a beard to the mix, and I haven't said a word yet about the polyester shirt he's got on. Listen, I love disco as much as the next guy, but—

He snaps his fingers in front of my face like I'm a badly-behaved dog, which makes me go for the worst defense possible in this situation. Sarcasm. "Wasn't you always tellin' me that it only takes one time, growin' up?"

Tim slams his hand down on the table so hard, half his beer sloshes onto the beat-up wood. "This ain't no bad report card or a fight at school, Carlos, are you really crackin' jokes right now?" And with the use of my full name, my brother's regained the ability to hook and drag me back to age fourteen, pulling faces while he gave me some hypocritical lecture or other. If only I'd ever listened. "You are makin' kids. How the fuck do you find it this hard to remember to put on a condom?"

Most people assume Mike was an accident— he wasn't. Luis told us that it was a good idea to have a kid, so that the draft board wouldn't come after me, and back then Jasmine and I still worshipped him like a cross between Alexander the Great and the Pope. It took me a few years to realize that at that point in time, Luis had no real fear of it, and that he could've just sent me to a medical examination jumped up on amphetamines or arranged for me to be booked on some low-level felony. A child kept us dependent on him, gave him a useful piece of leverage.

My uncle has two kids of his own, though he'll take his denials to the grave. Daughters, which is why he won't cop to it. I know what he'd tell me to do right now, if I brought this problem to his doorstep.

"I'm married, man." I give the back of my neck an awkward, stilted scratch, like I'm stalling for time. "I don't have to use those."

"Yeah, you know how I really try to avoid these problems in my own marriage? I don't put my dick inside other women. You considered giving that a shot?"

I could really twist the knife in, if I wanted to. I've got what you could call an uncanny ability to pinpoint someone's weaknesses, then strike, but Tim is my brother and I don't have to do no psychological jiu-jitsu to hurt him, when there's so many obvious targets. Hey, remember the time Gabi was crying on my couch 'cause you were never home anymore, thought you were out with a whole address book of broads? Turned out you were just busy gambling all the rent money, schizo, but while you're here actin' like father and husband of the year—

I'd never say it, though, I never could. He's doing a lot better on lithium, doesn't stick barrels in his mouth anymore or try to write Bible verses in blood; he's filled out some, doesn't look so much like a malnourished tiger ready to snap your throat out for a scrap of meat. He could be any thirty-something dad now, calm and content, right down to his lousy outfits and the booster seat with smashed Cheerios in his used sedan. Half his friends don't have the first clue what he came from, who he's related to, and he likes it that way. "If I knew you was havin' no fucking kids with that broad," he chugs the remaining beer in one gulp, though I'm not sure he's supposed to mix alcohol with his medication, "I would've told Jasmine myself."

(Keep your goddamn mouth shut about it. His hand dug so hard into my bicep I knew there would be a bruise the next day. I almost hoped for it, the tiniest portion of the punishment I deserved. You want to leave her, Curly? You want a divorce, you want to put your son through a broken home, the way we grew up? I shook my head hard enough to rattle the few brains I ever had. Then be a man, and live with your sorry conscience on your own.)

"I fucked up," I say slowly. Ain't that the understatement of the year. "But I swear it was just the one time, man, swear on Santi's grave—" By the way he's glaring at me, he ain't so thrilled I'm invoking our dead cousin in this shit, but he was the first relative that came to my mind. "I got real unlucky."

"Are you even sure she's yours?" he demands next. "I don't care how much you've convinced yourself she looks just like our spitting image, how do you know that this woman ain't takin' you for a ride, tryna get some of that sweet, sweet coke money? You need to at least get a blood test done—"

"Yeah, no, I get it," I say slowly, "I need to get a blood test done, prove paternity, then I'll have rights as her—"

"... You don't have no rights, Curly," he says like he's trying to explain a very simple concept to a retarded toddler, which is usually how he talks to me, but even more exaggerated now. "You're an unmarried father who ain't on the birth certificate, and a criminal with 'I kill people' tattooed across your face. What the hell are you imaginin' here even if you succeed, huh? You're gonna bring her home to Jasmine? Boy, ain't she gonna just love that."

"You know this is your niece, right?" I have no right to be getting irritated with anybody, but I'm not so thrilled about how he's talking about her, like she's some kind of inconvenience. "Not an unwanted puppy?"

"I don't know how much longer you expect me to clean up your goddamn messes, and the only thing I'm hearing right now? Is that you're about to give me another kid to raise, once the novelty wears off," he hisses, getting right up into my face. Doesn't give me one inch. "You're aware that I have my own family, yeah? That Gabi's got to bust her ass lookin' after your boy whenever you drop him on my doorstep for weeks at a time? I love Mike like he's my own, but he ain't, he's your job, your responsibility—"

"If he's such a burden to you, man, can't even begin to count the amount of times I've offered you money, don't start accusing me of bein' tacaño—"

"I don't need your fucking blood money to look after my own nephew, this ain't about that—"

"He's better off growin' up away from all this shit—"

"And I don't want you involved in none of this shit! You still don't get that yet?"

I about jump off the bench when he shouts, and the bartender gives us a look filthy enough to kill, one that threatens being sent outside with the next strike. Tim colors a little. He's gotten better at expressing his feelings over the past few years— or, you know, admitting he has them at all— but I still can't remember the last time he got worked up enough to yell. And something clicks for me in that moment, that my fear and worry for my son, maybe that's a fraction of what he feels for me now. We can act more like brothers now that we're both grown, hell, I'm taller than him, but he's the only real parent I ever had. Which is why I ask, resigned, "what are you gettin' at here? What choice do I even have, huh? Walk away?"

I said it as a wild hypothetical, but he pinches the bridge of his nose so hard I swear it'll come off. "Yeah, Curly, that's what I'm tellin' you to do. To walk away, before you destroy your son's life, and Jasmine's too." He points an accusatory finger at me like he's Pontius Pilate. "You think I like sayin' this, about my niece? You think I like any of this? But you can't even look after the kid you have now."

As long as I can remember, for better or for worse, my brother's been my moral compass— but he was wrong then and he's wrong now, and that's all there is to it. I'm a killer. I've spent my entire life so far stealing, cheating, lying, manipulating, and screwing people over, hell, it's the only thing I'm good at and the only way I've ever earned a living. And like Tim so lovingly pointed out, I'm no Mike Brady. But if I walk away from my own child, then I'll finally have reached the point where it's worth nothing at all. How's my daughter going to grow up, without her daddy to protect her? Is she going to look for one in adulthood, settle for the first man that'll have her?

Is she going to end up with a stepdaddy like Angela had, without me around to protect her?

No, I need to do what I should've done five years ago, as much as it fills me with a sense of dread no vodka cranberry can begin to alleviate, and something I've never been an expert at. Be a man. Tell the truth.