When Chris was eight, his mother left him alone in the waiting room of the city clinic while she got her eye sewn up. The only thing around to read were those stupid women's magazines that lived next to the chewing gum and other things they couldn't afford at the super market. He ended up reading an article called "The Rising Tide of Absentee Fatherhood: What is it Doing to Our Children?" and decided that he would never ever drop out of high school or join a gang looking for paternal approval or get a girl in high school pregnant or become a homosexual. He wasn't sure how someone could do both of the last two at once but he swore to himself that he'd never do either, so it didn't really matter.

When Chris's mother reads his high school senior yearbook, she sighs at his picture and says, "Your hair is so long, you look like --" but she then she stops herself. When she reads his quote, she sighs again and says, "Honey, you should go to college."

"I will," Chris says, because he will, somehow, at night, with three jobs and it might take him eight years to do what kids with money can do in four but he'll do it.

"No," she says, "You should do it for real. I could call Orlando. I could call your father."

Chris is smart, he knows a lot of words. He doesn't like to brag, but he got a 690 on his SAT verbal. It's the kind of thing he might brag about to his mother, maybe. But then he would have to tell her about how the school counselor called him up to her office in the middle of class and told him that the school district would pay for him to take the test. "Subsidized learning," she said. Chris knows a lot of words, he knows that "subsidized" meant "hand-out" but at least she didn't say free lunch.

Your father. Two words that Chris has always associated with other people. The first word is possessive and Chris has always been suspicious of the possessive because he knows that everything you think you own can get taken away from you. The second word is too foreign to even consider.

He doesn't have a father to speak of, just a last name that doesn't match anyone else in his family, six photographs with worn edges and a home movie reel that he can't even watch anymore because he wore out the projector when he was ten. And that's enough. He's got his mother, Molly and Kate and he's been taking care of them as well as he can for as long as he can. When he told the girl from the yearbook he wanted to go to college and become rich, he only ever meant he wanted to be able to take care of them better.

So, Orlando, then. Big city. Bright lights. Beaches. Blue skies. His father.