Finding Family, Part One: The Man Who Wasn’t There

The clues to my father’s identity didn’t mean a thing — until I knew to look.

The story of my family doesn’t begin with four Cuban men standing on a beach in Miami comparing feet, but some part of it is anchored there forever. It was one of a few moments in my childhood that could have revealed the truth, the existence of parallel life narratives starring two different fathers. It was a moment that at once said too much and too little, a blip in time that became key to the narrative a decade later.

I was ten, fishing with my dad, my older brother Ignacio, and my dad’s buddy, a man I didn’t know, like so many of the people who cycled through the summers of my kid-of-divorce childhood.

During the school year, Ignacio and I lived in Maine with our mom, a Scotch-Irish farm girl who had briefly become a city girl in her early 20’s, a few brief years long enough to marry our dad, a recent Cuban exile living in Boston. They met working in a factory full of his countrymen, a place where she was the exception. When most of the crew moved to Miami, they moved too, and she felt even more like a fish out of water.