On the day my father told us he was selling the Nest, I decided to clone him. I spent twenty minutes waiting for a customer service representative, jangling my foot to an instrumental version of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” I tried to remember the lyrics. Something about running and returning, but also never coming back. “What’s the reason for your request?” the rep asked cheerily, when she finally cut into the song’s wailing synth and pithy cymbals.
“To engage with somatic avenues for recovery,” I said, paraphrasing a quote I’d underlined in The Body Keeps the Score. Except it wasn’t my body I was scoring anymore. I needed a new body to assess. “To heal,” I simplified when the rep met my first reason with silence. “To stop suffering,” I added, in case she needed to document something more concrete. “I better expedite your request,” she said, and confirmed my mailing address. I could hear the frown in her voice.
I’d spent that morning showing the Montes matriarchs a condo in Playa del Rey, sunlight marbling the surface of the emerald ocean. The patio was furnished with a row of squat young palm trees that reminded me of grumpy dwarfs. The owner’s realtor promised they’d yield shade in three to five years, a fact I repeated to the Monteses in the same chirpy voice as the customer service rep.
It was the twelfth house I’d shown the Monteses that month. The condo had everything they asked for: 3bed 2bath, new appliances, and an ocean view. “The beach is right there,” I fizzed, pointing to a pallid family of five setting up camp on shore, spreading sunscreen on each other even though the morning fog hadn’t even burned off yet. “Right! There!”
Mrs. Montes rested both of her hands on the top of her cane. “There are no blinds. I feel naked just standing here. I don’t want my unmentionables on display.” I tried to push the mental picture of a naked Mrs. Montes out of my mind, replacing it with a colorful mandala, breathing in and then out for four, holding at the top and bottom as my yoga teacher had instructed.
“Ma,” the second Mrs. Montes, Layla, sighed. I gleaned from context cues and a lack of family resemblance that the first Mrs. Montes was Layla’s mother-in-law. “We’ll buy curtains.” She smiled at me apologetically, as if she were responsible for crotchety old women everywhere.
“The ceilings are too low,” Mrs. Montes the elder snapped back. “It’s like I’m being pulverized by this popcorn ceiling.”
“I’m happy to ask if the owner is willing to install blinds as part of the sale,” I offered. My yoga teacher had advised me to extend radical generosity.
Mrs. Montes raised her penciled eyebrows. “Don’t pander, young lady.”
I hadn’t felt young for a while. This was part of the problem, as my therapist Elsa and I had identified many times. Trauma lives in the body, as Bessel van der Kolk says, keeping us at war with ourselves. I felt the blood vessels under my eyes twitching every time Mrs. Montes spoke, an artillery of nerves.
By the time I arrived at my father’s Cultural Reclamation Center, I was exhausted by other people’s demands. I sat in his living room chambers, chewing my food, offering no details about my life and asking for none in return. We gathered around the dining room table to celebrate my little sister Nella’s birthday. My father had made the table himself years before. I gave myself splinters every time I ran my hands over the pine. He was dressed in a raw linen he usually reserved for sermons, spray-painted silver. It was noon. A half-eaten platter of smoked salmon lay in a jumble between us like some poorly dissected animal. “May this year bring as many new joys as responsibilities,” my father said. His mouth twitched as he mentally calculated, I imagined, my sister’s duties against her joys. I noticed the tidal creases around his eyes, the mottled folds of his skin. He reminded me of a very large and very judgmental hairless cat.
“I’ve taken on a new minder,” he announced. My father used the term “minder” for his wives, making them sound more administrative than amorous. They helped him with the Cultural Reclamation Center, a place that promised to grow back the phantom limb of belonging for those who had lost touch with their cultural roots. It involved a lot of chanting. It involved a lot of energy work, moving auras around in the air with his hands.
His clients were usually rich and international, products of new globalization, the sons and daughters of businessmen and developers raised across the world. They spoke in continental accents. They were well taken care of and also lonely, unfamiliar with themselves. I once saw the child of a diplomat throw her iPhone in the trash because it had a scratch on its rose gold case. My father taught them techniques for cultural integration, mapping out their homeland, their parents’ origins, and where their own belonging lay. “Call it narrative distance,” he quipped. “Take control of your own story. Chart your own place in this world.” He walked people through how to talk to their ancestors using bits of their clothing or fistfuls of family land.
People ate it up. They registered for his Cultural Rehabilitation classes, bought into his life immersion philosophy, signed over their châteaus, high rises, and brownstones, and then moved into shared units at the CRC, a cluster of patched roofs on the edge of the Arts District.
“This one’s a property lawyer,” my father continued, wiggling a sliver of salmon around on his plate so that it swam across the pink china. One could detect a note of exhaustion in his voice, like he had just replaced a refrigerator instead of a spouse. “I think she’ll really contribute to the CRC’s stability.” As he spoke, my father’s third minder did the dishes while his fifth popped all the balloons, sweeping them into a paper bag.
He pulled at a tuft of cotton candy hair. Once he’d gone white, he started dying it pink. He had a minder dedicated to root touch-up. “Of course, I had to give her the Nest to get her on board.”
The Nest was our nickname for my late abuela’s apartment. It sat on the lip of Dockweiler Beach, airplanes zooming overhead. When she died, we left it intact: her cabinet of porcelain dolls, Virgin Marys crammed into every corner, the rotting wood painted baby blue, aloe vera plants growing crowns out of empty coffee cans.
Maybe I wouldn’t have bought the clone if it were only my hurt I had to contend with. Out of all of us, Nella loved the Nest the most. While I spent summers at interfaith camp, my little sister feared other people. She rose at dawn with our grandmother to launder strangers’ clothes. She learned how to separate trash from treasure on the ink-stained shores. My sister still went over to the Nest to water her patio plants every week. The year Abuela passed, my father used her face for the CRC’s brochures, her laugh lines acting as a beacon for curious believers. The Nest was the only CRC property I’d refused to sell. He’d promised it to us upon his death.
Nella clapped a hand over her mouth, as if the ocean she loved might pour out of it. I flinched. Sporadic displays of emotion made our family nervous. My father taught followers to move slowly through their feelings, relinquishing what might not be ours to hold. “Clutch your stomach,” he often started his Corporal Knowing exercise. “Feel that stone of tension? It probably goes generations back.”
My father arranged his face into a placid surface. He knitted his fingers and angled his bony elbows precariously on the edge of the table. He was pressing so hard, I worried he might bruise. He had been an elderly and powerful man for some time. It was as if he derived his power from being close to death.
“Do you want the Center to collapse?” he asked her. We’d heard this question a million times growing up—when we were reluctant to give up the birthday money our mother sent us, when we didn’t want to oil the CRC floors.
Nella’s features hardened into pretend indifference. There was some kind of phantom shard in her face, something I couldn’t see that was pricking her. I laid my palm down on a table splinter so I could better understand what she was feeling.
My father continued taking the bit of fish on a journey around his plate. It was my turn next. He spoke to my cleavage. “You might be asked to help appraise the value of the property.” I became a realtor six years ago at my father’s behest, though I hated all the pantomime of the job. The cookie spray and fake smiling. The hiding of mouse holes and ant trails and minimizing of cracked foundations. For someone who cared so much about the metaphysical, who had a list of spiritual concerns for this world, my father focused much of his attention on the physical one, on the things he could touch with his own two hands.
A sheet of hair hid my sister’s face now, but I could still sense the shard, the tiny, invisible thing prodding her. Hadn’t he taken enough? I nodded at my father, knowing that it would be the last favor I did for him.
_____
Up until the Nest news, I’d focused much of my mental health journey on forgiveness. With the support of Elsa, I sat across from an empty chair and mechanically listed my grievances: our rationed meals, our indoor childhood, the weekends I’d spent balancing the Center’s books. The idea was that if I listed enough of them, I’d eventually be released of my rage. But without a body present, the whole thing just felt like amateur theater, a pastime my father taught us to hate. EMDR offered little relief. As I followed the dot of light, I could only bring to mind faint memories—the time my father forced me to be the corpse for a CRC client sitting retroactive shiva, skipping my prom to host the center’s annual open house, the endless language classes.
Elsa thought it had something to do with my mother leaving. “It’s called Cold Mother Syndrome,” she said to me with grating superiority, as if I’d never read a book before, as if I hadn’t run into her at the grocery store that one time, and all she had in her basket were condoms and Diet Coke.
I thought my anger would deplete, but it just kept refilling inside me. Some ancestor way back had really been wronged.
I came across the clones weeks ago, via Instagram ad. The service was called 2ndLove. It popped up amidst ads for anti-wrinkle cream, cellulite be-gone, and those affirmation apps. No doubt the algorithm tracked my Amazon searches for self-help books about parental estrangement. In the video commercial, one middle-aged woman—her exact replica—stepped out from behind another. The replica was smiling, her skin glowing, almost taut, while the original’s face was ashen, her shoulders hunched. The replica ran to embrace a shadowy figure off-screen. Your core relationships, without the quarrels, the text promised, blurring together into fairy dust. I knew it was ridiculous as I clicked the button for a trial period, but I couldn’t help myself. My inner child needed reparenting.
A few days after my sister’s birthday brunch, the clone arrived at my doorstep in a small box, the size of a new pair of shoes. The instructions urged users to immediately submerge the clone in water. I placed the small fleshy mound into my filled bathtub. The mound was knobby and looked almost, but not quite, like an ear. I went into the kitchen to read the rest of the instructions and have a snack. I set a timer on my microwave. I made a cup of tea and broke up with Elsa via email.
The timer dinged. I peered into the bathroom and there he was, slumped down into the tub, eyes closed, arms folded over his chest like he was dead. As he opened his eyes, a jolt of fear froze me in place. I wasn’t used to the directness of my father’s gaze. His attention always happened sideways, an accident. But then the clone smiled at me and I knew he was a stranger. “Good morning,” he beamed as I pulled him out of the tub. “Delighted.” I was surprised at the clone’s pleasantries. It seemed irresponsible on the part of 2ndLove that customers would want their replacement kin to be so polite. It was better they said nothing at all. I demonstrated this opinion by draping a damp cloth over the clone’s head while I further familiarized myself with the instructions.
Once the clone fully hydrated, it was time to program it. You were supposed to program your clone only with the good memories of the person you were replicating. I added in the flower pressings my father taught me how to make; the perfect Eeyore voice he read to us in when I was little. I erased the minders, his suggestions that I stuff my bra or that one movie night long ago, when he’d slotted his hand between my thighs like a credit card, leaving it there, unmoving.
_____
Three days after getting him, I left the clone home alone for the first time. I had found the Montes matriarchs a pristine apartment in Pointe Dume. “Semi-detached,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the lack of neighbors to their right. “Just you and the elements. No noisy neighbors peeking in. Notice the ceilings.” I’d decided to drop my friendliness and take on the tone of an expert. “Popcorn-less. It’s practically a cathedral.”
“I don’t like cathedrals,” Mrs. Montes said. “I’ve seen too many in my lifetime.” I let out a bark of laughter. It was the kind of statement of fact that my own grandmother would have made. She was a practical person, doling out love and praise only when absolutely necessary. Maybe that’s why my father turned out the way he did—transactional, hungry to be observed. But she could be tender with us, caressing the tops of our heads as we read to her out loud. I caught my father watching us once, his face frozen in a grimace. Perhaps it upset him that her tenderness skipped a generation. She, like Mrs. Montes, was the kind of woman who thought crying was a waste of energy. Agua pasada no mueve molino.
I was, if I do say so myself, quite calm about the whole I-don’t-like-cathedrals thing. I’d written my gratitude list that morning. One of the items I’d been grateful for was the sun, and I turned toward it then, away from Mrs. Montes’s penciled eyebrows, letting it bathe the side of my face, reminding me that there was a world out there, beyond these vaulted ceilings.
When I got home I asked the clone to make me my favorite meal: grilled onions, a can of Ducal beans, and warm tortillas. “I used to eat this all the time in college,” I told him. College, the only four years I’d ever spent away from the CRC.
Brain food, the clone said, kneading his temples, infusing them with imaginary knowledge. Only later did it occur to me that it was the classic definition of a dad joke.
_____
I took some time off work because my father’s clone required frequent watering. My clients let themselves into the open houses. They helped themselves to the cookies and lemonade I set out in pristine Malibu kitchens. I watched from Diamond Bar on NannyCam. 2nd Dad peered over my shoulder. “They’re just property tourists,” he said, dismissing a middle-aged couple. The woman was waif-like, her face lined only in patches, probably a former actress turned Madewell clerk. The husband had a climber’s build. An out-of-work sculptor, I guessed. “They’re never going to buy.”
2nd Dad learned the phrase “property tourist” from my realtor’s manual, which I’d given him to study while I was occupied. The 2ndLove instructions said you had to soak the clone’s body in water for a full twenty-four hours to keep it pliable, its skin as supple as a human’s. I’d lent him my manual to keep him occupied in the water. He’d already read it cover to cover. Over NannyCam, the husband scarfed more cookies as his wife wistfully stared out the window. When other potential buyers came into the kitchen, he whipped out the tape measure attached to his belt and pretended to measure the kitchen counters.
Once I was finished with paperwork, 2nd Dad and I spent a few more hours in the tub. We set up the stage on the surface of the water, used the bath toys as pretend kin. At the CRC, my father helped clients manifest future kin, making speculative puppets of one’s unborn relatives, playing out the hopes they had for their lives on a cardboard stage. A bit derivative of Jung, really, but the 2nd Dad and I gave my father’s methodology a whirl. I pulled out my iPad. We used AI to render what these imagined ancestors might look like. I had to admit, creating one’s own past had an appeal.
But I wasn’t paying attention. I let the clone soak too long and I reverse-aged him. My 2nd Dad came out looking like a photograph I’d seen of my real father in magazines, a young and gifted scientist. Before he built an empire out of other people’s expired dreams or pressing fears. Before the promise of eternal life and ancestral union. Before the YouTube channel and the web series and the sermons from the basement of the Institute, his voice ricocheting off the tin panels in the room.
My father gave lectures on his latest musings once a week, which could be livestreamed for a small fee. After buying 2nd Dad, I paid for them anonymously, viewed them while crouched in the back of my walk-in closet, letting all my unworn overcoats muffle the sound of my father’s voice. My 2nd Dad, by contrast, was a terrible orator. I fed public speaking advice into its program, but nothing helped. I gathered that this was not a natural skill for my natural-born father, that it was something he had earned through practice. I pictured him as a boy, speaking breathlessly to his own reflection in the mirror.
I informed my sister of this new insight into our father when she came to visit. She stopped by after our evening bath. 2nd Dad and I were wearing separate Snuggies but leaning back-to-back to create one fleece animal. We read our magazines, his Architectural Digest and mine Realty Times. “Parallel play,” the mommy blogs called it. I thought it would be good for us, training us both to have healthy bonding skills. We passed a popsicle between us, our after-dinner treat.
2nd Dad stretched out his hand to her. “Pleased to meet you, young lady.” It was the “young lady” that gave him away, the fact that he could tell the difference between a woman and a girl.
“How is this helping you?” my sister asked. She was wearing the uniform of CRC higher-ups: a silk lilac Nike track suit with the Inca symbol for peace where the logo should be.
“He’s different,” I demonstrated, pointing to 2nd Dad, who was innocently sucking on the popsicle. He removed it from his mouth, a string of saliva still affixed to his lip, and offered it to me. “See,” I assessed. “Completely selfless.”
“When you’re done with this whole schtick you should come see Dad. He’s looking poorly.”
“That’s just the way he looks,” I said, stroking the top of my 2nd Dad’s silky hair. I was showing off a little bit, I’ll admit. I swept tea grounds from his cheek. The 2ndLove customer service rep suggested I press tea bags to his skin to fix the reverse ageing. It worked.
After Nella left, I tried the Empty Chair method with 2nd Dad, but he kept interrupting me. He asked me to clarify certain references: my father’s minders, the fight over college, selling the Nest, the credit card hand, my sister’s pained face. After twenty minutes, 2nd Dad sat there mute, bewildered by my father’s behavior. “If I could I’d wring my own neck.” He pantomimed a fight with himself and by the end we were both crying laughing.
_____
“I don’t need to wear a bra anymore,” Mrs. Montes told me. She’d started to use statements of fact in lieu of greetings. At first, I thought she was making a joke about our hippy dippy surroundings. I’d convinced them to look at a Craftsman home in Topanga Canyon, though it was a bit out of their price range.
“Ignore Mom,” Mrs. Montes the younger instructed me. “She’s in her regressive phase.”
There was a faint ring of dirt around the collar of Mrs. Montes’s neck. Dead skin, it seemed. She smelled of musty laundry. Not for the first time, I wondered where Mr. Montes Jr. was, why he wasn’t the one taking care of his childlike mother. I tried to picture him: tall with a weak jaw and the same pursed lips. Clearly, he was either a very lazy or a very busy man. He hadn’t been to a single one of the dozen house showings.
“What do you think of the ceiling?” I asked Mrs. Montes energetically. “Normal, you’ll find.”
Instead of answering, Mrs. Montes slowly, but musically, broke wind.
“You’ll have to forgive her,” Mrs. Montes the younger said, not bothering to cover her nose. “She’s having a bad day. I’m afraid this won’t work. All bedrooms must be on the ground floor.”
“We’re moving,” Mrs. Montes said gleefully. “Isn’t it exciting? I love a move.”
“We’re transitioning to live-in care,” Mrs. Montes the younger explained to me, while Mrs. Montes was in the bathroom. “We suspected a decline for some time, then all of a sudden, this,” Mrs. Montes swept a hand in the direction of the bathroom, “started happening. José is very concerned.”
“I lost my own mother,” Mrs. Montes the younger continued, her eyes still on the bathroom door. “Dolores sort of adopted me. You should have seen her ten years ago. So vivacious. Always hosting dinner parties.”
“What would you do if you could meet your mother again?” I asked.
She glanced toward the bathroom. “I’m not sure I’d want to find out.”
_____
I took 2nd Dad to my next property showing, a high-rise apartment downtown. I dressed him in a casual blue suit, no tie. My company encouraged us to mention the area’s walkability and characterize the new housing facility in Skid Row as “mixed income.” The first people to arrive were two teachers with an infant in a stroller. They wanted to be closer to work but were worried about local schools. “The sweetest little one,” 2nd Dad cooed, bending at his hips to greet the child. “He has a smart look. Bet he’ll be talking before he’s six months. The school down the road’s a Montessori. Mark Ruffalo sends his kids there.”
This seemed to please the teachers, but they worried out loud about the price. My 2nd Dad stepped in quickly. “With an ARM loan of course, your mortgage will be pennies.”
“How’d you know about the Ruffalo kids?” I asked, once the teachers were gone.
“I made it up.” 2nd Dad smiled triumphantly. Fear clanged around in my stomach, as if a bat had been let loose in there. I didn’t know clones could learn how to lie. I swallowed it. “Maybe you should be doing my job,” I joked.
“Maybe,” he mused.
That night we celebrated with seafood. I’d been introducing 2nd Dad to one new food a week. He sucked down an oyster. “That’s some world-class snot!” he said. We were working on his sense of humor. It was becoming a little too visceral for my taste. I drank too much chardonnay and collapsed into bed.
The next morning, I found 2nd Dad at my laptop. “Bonjour, Sleepy Head!” he sang. He’d made coffee, though not very well. He couldn’t quite get the concept of brew ratios, even though I’d sent him countless videos about it. Some technology is incompetent no matter what you do. “I called the teachers already and scheduled a second visit.”
“Why would you do that?” I said, blinking at him as I tried to suck down some of the acidic coffee. It instantly gave me a headache.
“Why not? Strike while the bulldog salivates, that’s what the manual said.” The manual was full of mixed metaphors like that.
“I decide when the bulldog salivates,” I found myself yelling. “I decide.”
I locked myself in the bathroom for the rest of the morning. 2nd Dad didn’t apologize, but he did leave me breakfast at the door: oats soaked in water with strawberries on top. He’d seen me make this for myself, though he’d failed to recognize that I boiled the water. I ate the cold, soggy oats and cried without knowing why.
While 2nd Dad was in the tub that night, I tuned into my father’s lectures. He’d given my sister her own segment, an honor not bestowed on any other employee. I watched her lips make the same shapes as his, parrot a slant version of his usual agenda like a poorly written pop song.
I stopped programming the 2nd Dad after that. Starved for context, the clone became a nobody. His algorithm grasped for info in the outside world. One morning at the breakfast table, he went on a long ode to cornflakes.
_____
The condo sale from a recent CRC convert had not gone through. As the realtor of record, they needed my signature to reinitiate the process. My father called me nonstop for a week. I ignored him. My sister texted me to say she had a cold, and would I bring her some soup? It was a ruse, of course, but it was hard for me to deny my sister anything. I resigned myself to seeing my real father. I took 2nd Dad with me. I thought he deserved to know where he came from.
I stood outside and looked up at the Center’s sign. They’d done a total rebrand. The word “rehabilitation” was now in cursive, its meaning softer and welcoming. Despite the client properties, most of the Center’s money was made by renting office space to aspiring entrepreneurs. Sometimes my father gave them a work-trade in exchange for web development, uncovering an ancestor, or offering a free dead languages class. The graphic designers brightened up the CRC’s socials with lime green fonts and fuchsia lettering. Gen Z aesthetics, the aging millennial tenants claimed.
My real father seemed unaware that we were not speaking. He greeted me warmly. I glanced upstairs toward the recreation rooms, where my sister was surely swaddled in a mess of quilts, a minder sitting in a corner reading a magazine. “How is she?” I asked.
“Same as usual,” my father said. “It’s the sickness.” My sister had been ill on and off since childhood. My father insisted that as a baby she swallowed a ghost plagued by Shame. He claimed she had all the physical manifestations: yellow eyeballs, small pupils, and a propensity to laugh too early at other people’s jokes. I don’t know about her eyeballs, but on that last point he was right. Most times she’d be cackling before the punch line.
“Who’s this?” My real dad nodded toward 2nd Dad, who was helping himself to a cup of coffee.
“I call him 2nd Dad,” I sniffed, hoping to hurt him.
“Absolutely extraordinary,” my real dad said, peering at the clone. He pressed his hands together, the same way he would in my lap. I realized with horror that he was delighted.
“You can’t clone yourself,” I said quickly. “It’s against the rules. The World Health Organization has a whole statement about it on the website.”
“Glad to see you’re entertaining yourself, darling. Bit like performance art, isn’t it?” He shook 2nd Dad’s hand, which I noticed was getting a bit rubbery. He was due for a bath. “You’re welcome to visit anytime, governor.” That’s what my father called people and objects he approved of, “governor,” as if his approval gave them administrative power.
I offered my real dad some of the soup. 2nd Dad refused it. “Spice gives me the runs,” 2nd Dad said sheepishly, which I thought was an interesting development. My real dad was slurping it up. From reading the 2ndLove manual, I knew clones were supposed to have the exact genetic makeup of their predecessors. I made a mental note to call the customer support line later that afternoon.
After having his soup, my real father eased into his chair. Even then he was losing things—words, his train of thought. The bottom would fall out of the conversation, and he’d sit there, staring at the space just past you, riveted by the dust particles in the air.
_____
That afternoon, I had another appointment with the Monteses. This time, Mr. Montes showed up at the door with his mother. He wasn’t at all how I pictured. He looked like Mario Lopez playing a corporate lawyer. He had an easy charisma, exactly how his wife had described his mother.
I said as much to him. “Years of being my mother’s hype man,” he laughed. “There’s no one more charming than a child who grows up the only kid among adults.” I pictured Mr. Montes Jr., a lonely kid hiding under tables, cringing through his mother’s party stories, clinging to her cocktail dress.
Mrs. Montes’s clothes were clean, but her auburn hair was tangled into the cascade of pearls around her neck. Her son stroked her hair as Mrs. Montes played Chutes and Ladders on her phone, stopping every few seconds to work the hair clumps with his fingers.
“When she first got sick, I was so angry.” Mr. Montes Jr. spoke as if Mrs. Montes weren’t there. “You have all these resentments, all these quibbles about who they are, and then they just go and lose even that.”
I tried to show them the original fireplace, but neither of them moved. “We’re taking some classes at the CRC together,” Mr. Montes continued. “These days she can’t even remember how to fry an empanada. Please thank your father for me. It’s been good. Like a second chance to be a son.”
_____
On a chilly day in November, one of my father’s minders called from the Center. 2nd Dad read at the breakfast nook, a bright red scarf around his neck. He’d figured out how to moderate his own body temperature by then. “Your father is unwell,” the minder said before hello. “More unwell than usual. He’s seeing things. I think you should come quickly.” She hung up. It was always like that with minders. They never announced their arrival or departure.
Again, I let 2nd Dad tag along. We were out together more and more in those days. I gave us matching haircuts, dressed us in similar hues. People stopped us in the street to tell us how cute we were. “She couldn’t disown you if she tried,” one elderly woman joked at 2nd Dad.
When we arrived at the CRC my real father was not in his usual chair. “He’s not eating either,” the minder who had called me said, picking up our phone conversation where she’d hung up. “He’ll only drink chicha morada.” His favorite drink from his childhood in the Andes. He’d told me about lingering by the corner stand as a boy, waiting for someone to leave a cup half drunk.
We entered the dark room where my father lay. It smelled of rotting broccoli. He looked almost sweet wrapped up in his favorite blankets, face gray but happy like he was waiting for a bedtime story. “Hello sweetheart,” he said, kissing both my cheeks wetly. “Lovely to see you. My beautiful child.” My eyes felt scratchy. My throat seized up. He’d never called me that before, “his child.” It was always his daughter or one of his daughters, separating our kin by gender.
This time, my father didn’t recognize himself. “Hello,” he said. “Are you her new beau? Much obliged.” He took his own hands, stared into his own eyes.
“He’s quite handsome,” my real father added, turning to me and winking. “I approve.”
_____
On the one-year anniversary of buying my 2nd Dad, my real father died. “He’s moved on,” one of the minders told me softly over the phone. “He’s with the ancestors now.”
“Which ones?” I asked. The Center promised to conjure up to three ancestors at the event of one’s passing. My father never guaranteed a painless death, just a less lonely one. It was sort of like group therapy.
“Just one,” the minder said. “His mother.” For all his pontificating in life, in death my father was a mama’s boy.
After I hung up, I sat at my kitchen island, trying to reverse the way 2nd Dad had rearranged the spice rack. A memory came to me. Two weeks after our grandmother died, my father woke me up in the middle of the night to make arepas. There was no one around, not even the third-generation Dominicans who stayed up late playing dominoes. I realized, as I pulled the handle of the fryer down, that I could count on one hand the number of times my father and I had ever been alone.
Deep in this thought, I released the handle too quickly. Hot oil spit across my wrist. Embarrassingly, I started to sob. My father reached for gauze in one of the cabinets. He grazed my red skin with ointment before wrapping it tenderly. “Don’t cry over spilt milk,” he said, and it made me sad that he felt the need to translate a phrase my grandmother had said so many times before. In my mind, my father never said a kind word to me. He never imparted a single lesson. But there it was, nimbly pushing its way up through the tangled roots of my subconscious, proving me wrong from beyond the grave.
I received an email that my 2ndLove warranty was up within minutes of the minder’s call. When my father died, my 2nd Dad was very sympathetic. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he kept saying, staring at the kitchen tiles. It was a relief that he didn’t try to hug me. He’d finally accepted that there could never be any real intimacy between us.
Within the same week, I received a fruit basket from Mr. Montes, thanking me for finding them a home. Mother is very satisfied, the card read. Though it’s not beachfront, she’s asked for seashell wallpaper, and now I’m not sure she even knows the difference!
I asked the 2nd Dad what it would have been like if my real dad had been different. Would I have changed his sheets at the hospital or spoon-fed him apple sauce? Would I have walked my father to the hillside of his own life, watched the light play over the canyon of his death?
2nd Dad shrugged at me and crossed his legs. He was poised over a sheet of paper, quill pen in hand. I’d been programming him with my favorite passages from Jane Austen. “I’m not sure I’m at liberty to answer,” he said.
_____
It’s been three weeks since my real father’s funeral. “You need to replace the body annually,” the customer service representative explains. She says her name is Sandy, but I suspect that isn’t true; she seems confused every time I say her name. “You can’t keep it in the house,” Sandy warns. “As the clone starts to deteriorate it emits poisonous toxins.”
“I know,” I say. “Smells just like Venice Beach,” hoping Sandy is a local.
To her credit, she does gift me a nervous laugh, her voice an octave higher when she next speaks. “Yes, well, do ship it as soon as you can. For your own good, dear.”
When he became too weak to get to his own bedroom, I let 2nd Dad stay on the couch. Every once in a while, he bleats requests for water. When he gets night sweats, I dab his head with a damp towel. He laughs in his sleep. It reminds me of my real dad reading the newspaper, chuckling at the conflicts of the day as if they were simple lovers’ spats, thinking, always, of that higher plane he’d promised himself and others.
My sister texts me a photograph of her feet. The nails are freshly painted a cool mint. The murky ocean outside the Nest is in the background. Apparently, my father left the apartment to her after all. I smile at my sister’s feet, satisfied that, maybe, one of us got what we wanted. My 2nd Dad agrees that she seems happy. I can almost taste salt in the air.
I glance over the top of 2nd Dad’s head at the blue light above my microwave. If I blur my eyes, it looks like the shoreline.
