My six-year-old had one arm through her backpack strap when she looked up and asked me why her OTHER DADDY didn’t come get her today.
Since Josie started school, Heather had done every single pickup, because my shifts ran until six and hers ended at two-thirty.
So when she texted on Wednesday that a staff meeting was running long and could I grab Josie, I asked Ortiz to cover the parts counter and clocked out at two.
I was crouched on the sidewalk outside her school in Kokomo, fighting her zipper, when it snagged on a rubber dinosaur keychain I had never seen in my life.
“Where’d you get this guy?” I said.
“OTHER Daddy won it at the zoo,” she said. “He takes me to Mommy’s work after school and then we all go home. He comes over when you’re at work too.”
The zipper finally gave.
“That’s cool, bug,” I said. “He was busy today, so you’re stuck with me.”
“He keeps telling me to call him Daddy but I don’t want to, so I say OTHER Daddy,” she said, and handed me her water bottle like that settled it.
She talked the whole drive home about a boy in her class who ate a purple crayon on purpose.
I kept both hands on the wheel and did the math.
Heather’s office was twenty minutes in the wrong direction from our house.
The zoo trip was in August, on a Saturday I’d worked a double.
She got home at six-twenty, kissed the top of my head and asked if pickup went okay, and I said, “Fine.”
I didn’t sleep.
Thursday morning I told Ortiz my truck needed a tire, and by two-forty I was parked across the street behind a landscaping trailer with a clean line to the front doors.
Heather’s car never came.
At three-ten the doors opened and Josie skipped down the steps holding a man’s hand, her pink backpack hanging off his other wrist like he’d carried it a hundred times.
He bent and tugged her hat down over her ears, and she laughed at whatever he said.
Navy coat, collar up, walking slow so her short legs could keep pace.
Then he turned to check for traffic.
My hands closed on the wheel until the leather creaked.
“WHAT THE FUCK,” I said to the empty truck, because I knew that face, and I knew exactly who OTHER DADDY was. ⬇️
Three-fourteen
It was my brother.
Brent. Forty-two years old, sells farm insurance out of a strip office on Markland, and has eaten Thanksgiving at my table every year since his divorce. I was standing next to him at the outlet mall in Edinburgh when he bought that coat, because it was forty percent off and he can’t pass up forty percent off.
He opened the back door of his Equinox and lifted Josie in. There was a booster seat back there already, buckled in, with a pink blanket folded on it.
I picked up my phone and called him.
Across the street Brent stopped with one hand on the roof of the car. He took the phone out of his coat, looked at the screen, and put it back. Then he shut her door, walked around to the driver’s side, and waved at the crossing guard. She waved back like she’d been doing it all year.
The Equinox pulled out and turned left. Toward Heather’s work.
I sat there with the phone ringing against my ear until his voicemail picked up. “You’ve got Brent Haskins, leave it at the beep.”
I didn’t leave anything.
There was a lawn guy unloading a mower off the trailer in front of me. He looked at me through my windshield for a second and went back to his ramp.
At three-fourteen my phone buzzed in my hand.
Heather. Got her!! She says hi daddy. Home by 6:20
The kitchen table, 2019
Heather and I tried for two years before Josie.
The doctor in Indianapolis put my numbers on a sheet of paper and turned it around on the desk so I could read them. He used the word “unlikely” twice. Heather held my hand in the parking garage and said we’d figure it out, and then we went home and figured out we didn’t have the money.
Brent came over on a Tuesday in March. He sat at our kitchen table, next to the salt shaker shaped like a pig that Heather’s aunt gave us, and wrote a check for six thousand dollars.
He wrote it with his left hand, the way he does everything, and dragged the side of his hand through the ink. Our mother always said Brent came out backwards and stayed that way. He’s the only lefty in the whole family.
“Family doesn’t keep score,” he said, and slid it across.
I cried at that table. I’m not proud of it. Brent put his hand on the back of my neck and shook it a little, like when we were kids.
Heather handled the clinic paperwork. She had a blue folder with the clinic’s logo on it, and that night she took one page out and put it in front of me with a pen. Husband’s Consent. My name was already typed under the line.
“The rest is the donor stuff,” she said. “It’s all medical. You don’t want to read it, babe. Trust me.”
I signed it. I didn’t read the rest.
My truck back then was an ’04 Silverado that wouldn’t start below thirty degrees, and the clinic was an hour south, so Brent drove us both times. He sat in the lot with the radio on. The second time, when Heather came out, he got out of the car and hugged her before I did.
Josie came that December.
Brent married Tammy Pruitt in 2016 at the Elks lodge, and I gave the toast. I said something about how he’d finally found somebody who laughed at his jokes on purpose, and everybody laughed, and Tammy laughed hardest. She left in the spring of 2024. She took the dog and told our mother that Brent “wanted something I couldn’t give him.” Mom repeated it at Easter like it was something Tammy did wrong.
When Josie started kindergarten, Heather put Brent on her emergency card, second line, right under her own name.
“In case,” she said. “He’s ten minutes from the school.”
I remember thinking that was nice of him.
Behind the landscaping trailer I typed Great to Heather and deleted it. I typed ok and sent that.
Then I put the truck in drive and went back to work.
Six-twenty
Ortiz looked at my tires when I came in and didn’t say anything about them.
I worked until six. I don’t remember a single part I pulled.
Heather came in the back door at six-twenty with Josie on her hip, and Josie had the dinosaur in her fist, swinging it by the chain. Heather put her keys in the bowl and asked if I wanted the leftover chili or if we were ordering.
“How was pickup?” I said.
“Good. She was good.” She was already at the fridge.
“I was across the street at three-ten.”
The fridge door stayed open. Josie went past us into the living room and turned on the TV.
Heather closed the fridge and stood there with both hands flat on it.
Her hours had changed last October. The office went to eight-thirty to five, everybody, no exceptions. She didn’t tell me because the counter had cut me to thirty-four hours that same month and we were already a payment behind on the house. She knew I’d quit to do pickups. She said that part twice.
“So I asked Brent,” she said. “One time. And then he just kept doing it.”
“A year.”
“Eleven months.”
“She calls him Daddy.”
“She calls him Other Daddy. It’s a joke they have.”
“She said he keeps telling her to call him Daddy.”
Heather opened the cabinet and took down two bowls. “She’s six. She gets things mixed up.”
I didn’t sleep that night either. Friday morning Josie sat at the counter drawing a horse for her teacher, and she had the crayon in her left hand, gripped down low by the point. Heather says she gets that from her grandpa on her side.
At seven-forty, before I left for work, I called Brent.
He picked up on the first ring this time. “Hey, bud.”
“I’m doing pickups from now on,” I said. “Starting Monday. Thanks for helping out.”
There was a little gap. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you need. You know I’m here.”
I thought that was the end of it. I got to the dealership, and at nine-fifteen my mother called the counter phone, which she has never once done.
“Brent’s real upset, honey,” she said.
“Mom, he’s been picking her up for a year and nobody told me.”
“I told Heather to tell you.” She was quiet a second. “Everybody knew but you, because you’d have made it into a thing. And look. You’re making it into a thing.”
“You knew?”
“He’s got nothing else since Tammy, Corey. Let him have his Wednesdays.”
Sycamore Street
Brent gave me a key to his place the week Tammy left, so I could let a plumber in while he was at work. It was still on my ring behind the one for the dealership’s back door.
Saturday morning he plays in a men’s league out at the course on the north side. Tee time at eight, every week since high school. At eight-thirty I was in his driveway.
I told myself I was going to leave the dinosaur on his counter. I’d taken it off Josie’s zipper Friday night after she was asleep. I had it in my pocket.
His house smelled like the same coffee as always. Nothing in the living room had moved since Tammy, except the dog bed was gone.
The door at the end of the hall used to be Tammy’s sewing room.
It was pink now. A twin bed with a quilt that had dinosaurs on it. A white dresser. A night-light shaped like a moon, plugged in by the floor. On the dresser there was a five-by-seven of Josie from the kindergarten picture day, the blue background one, in a frame. Heather told me we only ordered the one size, the one on our fridge.
In the top drawer there were two pairs of her pajamas, folded, and a toothbrush with a cartoon cat on it.
I stood in there a while.
In the kitchen, next to the coffee maker, there was a spiral notebook and an envelope.
The notebook was the green kind he’s used for his insurance mileage his whole life. I opened it in the middle. It wasn’t mileage. It was dates and dollars, in his slant, going back.
3/12/19 clinic $3,000.
5/7/19 clinic $3,000.
Then a gap of years. Then last October, and every weekday after it, a line. Pickup. Sometimes pickup, dinner H’s. In August: Zoo, $64, keychain $6. In September: shoes (hers too small), $42.
He had kept score.
The envelope was from a family law office on Sycamore Street, two blocks from the courthouse. It had been opened clean along the top with a knife. The date on the letter was Wednesday. The day he was busy.
I didn’t read the whole thing. I read the first two lines and put it back the way I found it, with the corner under the coffee maker.
The first line thanked him for meeting with them that morning.
The second line said Re: Establishing paternity of minor child J. Haskins, age 6.
The fire safe
The fire safe is on the floor of our bedroom closet, behind Heather’s boots. The code is Josie’s birthday.
Heather had taken Josie to a party at the trampoline place and wouldn’t be back until two. I sat on the closet floor and took everything out. The deed to the house. Our passports, which we’ve used once. Josie’s birth certificate, with my name on it.
And the blue folder.
The first page was the one I signed at the kitchen table. Husband’s Consent to Donor Insemination. My signature, kind of shaky. I remember the pen was out of ink and Heather had to get another one from the junk drawer.
The second and third pages were medical. Blood type, screening.
The fourth page was headed Directed Donor Agreement.
Under Donor someone had typed Brent Allen Haskins. Under Relationship to Recipient, it said Brother-in-law.
His signature was at the bottom, leaning hard to the right, with the smear through the last name where the side of his hand had gone through it. Next to it was Heather’s. The date was a week after the check.
I was still sitting on the closet floor with the page when the back door opened. Josie ran straight up to her room with a balloon. Heather came as far as the bedroom door and stopped.
She looked at what was in my hand. She didn’t ask what it was.
“The clinic list was nine thousand for the anonymous ones,” she said. “Nine. And they had a waiting list. Brent said he’d do it for free and the six thousand would cover the rest. He said you never had to know. He’d be Uncle Brent. That’s all he wanted to be.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And he was. He was, for years. Then Tammy left and he started asking for one afternoon.” She held onto the doorframe. “I never slept with him. I need you to hear me say that. Not once. Not ever.”
“Did you know he went to a lawyer?”
Her face changed. She didn’t know.
“On Wednesday,” I said. “That was his busy.”
Heather sat down on the end of the bed, the one Josie climbs into when it storms.
“He told me if I stopped letting him do pickups, he’d tell you himself,” she said. “Then last week he said he wanted to tell her at Christmas. I said over my dead body.”
“What’d he say?”
“He laughed.”
The cashier’s check
Saturday night I sold the Silverado to Ortiz’s cousin for six thousand, cash. It was worth closer to eight-five. He didn’t haggle and I didn’t want him to.
Monday at nine I was at the bank when it opened, and I walked out with a cashier’s check made out to Brent Haskins for six thousand dollars. At nine-thirty Heather and I sat in the school office together and took his name off Josie’s card. Heather signed it. Her hand was fine. She signed it like a grocery list.
The office lady asked if there was anything the school needed to know. Heather said, “If he comes, call me.”
At three-ten I picked up Josie. She asked where her dinosaur was and I said I’d find it.
Brent came to the house at three-fifty. Our mother was in the passenger seat of the Equinox. He’d brought her along to take Josie to the park after, the way they apparently did some Mondays.
He didn’t knock. He came in the front door, and Mom came in after him, holding her purse in front of her with both hands.
Josie was next door at Mrs. Nguyen’s. Heather had walked her over at three-thirty.
“The office lady looked at me like I was some kind of creep,” Brent said. “In front of the crossing guard. In front of the parents. Eleven months I’ve been getting that kid, and some woman in a lanyard tells me I’m not on a list?”
I took the check out of my shirt pocket and held it out.
He looked at it a long time before he took it. “What’s this.”
“The clinic,” I said.
He laughed, one time. “You think this is about six grand?”
He pulled the green notebook out of his coat and started reading. He read it like an invoice. Sixty-one pickups. Forty-two dollars of shoes because hers were too small, and he said “buddy” after that one. The zoo. The keychain. The night she threw up in his back seat and he drove her to Heather’s office with the windows down in October.
“I was there,” he said. “Where were you? Pulling brake pads?”
Mom said, “Brent.”
“I talked to a lawyer,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
That stopped him for about a second.
“Then you know what she said. Paper beats blood in this state. Your little consent form. Fine. Congratulations.” He tapped the notebook against his leg. “So I’m not going through the paper. She grows up knowing. She already calls me Daddy half the time. By Christmas it’ll be all the time, and you can’t stop a kid from knowing who her father is, bud. Nobody can.”
Heather said, “You offered. At our table. You said family doesn’t keep score.”
Brent held up the notebook and didn’t answer her.
My mother looked at him. Then at Heather. Then at the notebook.
“You told me she asked you,” Mom said. “You told me they came to you.”
“Ma. It doesn’t matter who asked.”
“It matters to me,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything else.
I said, “You’re off the card. You don’t come to the house. She hears it from us when she’s old enough to ask, and not at Christmas, and not from you. Mom can come Sundays.”
“You can’t keep my own mother from her,” Brent said.
“I just said she can come Sundays.”
He looked at the check again. I thought he was going to tear it. He’s done it before, to a check our dad wrote him, in 1999.
He folded it in half, opened the notebook to the back, and put it in behind the zoo.
Then he went out the front door, and after a minute my mother went out after him, because somebody had to sit in the car with him.
The Buick
In November I traded closes with Ortiz, so now I open at six and I’m off at two-thirty. It cost me the Saturday doubles. I bought a 2009 Buick off the back lot for eighteen hundred dollars. The heater only blows cold on the driver’s side and the radio is stuck on a country station out of Marion.
Mom comes Sundays. Not every Sunday.
Heather does dinner now and I do three-ten. We say more to each other in the kitchen than we used to. Some nights it’s about Brent. Most nights it’s chili.
On a Wednesday the week before Thanksgiving I was crouched on the sidewalk outside her school in Kokomo, fighting her zipper, and it snagged on the rubber dinosaur. I’d found it in my jacket a week after and clipped it back on. She’d asked for it every day.
“Is Other Daddy mad at me?” Josie said.
“Uncle Brent,” I said. “And no, bug. Nobody’s mad at you.”
She thought about that, and handed me her water bottle.
“Hold still,” I said, and worked the zipper around the dinosaur.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who stands outside a school at three-ten every day and never gets thanked for it.
If you’re looking for more heartwarming family stories, take a peek at My Mother’s Framed Adoption Decree Had A $34.99 Price Sticker On The Back or find out what happened when My Mother Finished Her Supper And Told Me Whose House It Was. And for a different kind of tale, you might enjoy discovering why My Grandson Wouldn’t Leave The Booth Because Of What Hung On Hook Forty-One.
