Chapter 2

"Can we talk for a minute, Mommy?" Maureen began nervously. I could tell something was up. She had only been home from school for a couple of days. She was a straight-A student in high school, valedictorian of her class. I wish I could say that I had something to do with that, but I didn't. I was an underachieving, slightly above-average student myself. The fact of the matter was that Maureen turned out the way she did because of McKayla.

I see so much of my wife in our daughter, even though they look nothing like one another. Where McKayla was tall and athletic, Maureen is built more like me: short and curvy. She's got a full head of curly sandy-blonde hair, not McKayla's glorious straight, raven-black mane. Yet to watch them walk and listen to them talk, they're almost identical. Our daughter copied many of McKayla's mannerisms and they have the same Mensa-level intelligence and curiosity about the world.

McKayla died when Maureen was in the eighth grade, but our daughter has always been wise beyond her years. I feared that she would be one of those kids who emotionally imploded when they lost a parent, but the exact opposite happened. Maureen dug in and became determined to make her Mom proud.

A month after the funeral, Maureen came into my bedroom one night and sat down. She had a pamphlet from the Duke University School of Medicine.

"I'm going to cure cancer," she said softly.

"I know you are, sweetheart," I said, not to patronise or belittle her, but because I knew right then that if there was cure for cancer to be found anywhere in this world, Maureen was going to hunt it down, and she was going to destroy the disease that had taken her Mom from her. So she and I made a deal; if she could get a free-ride scholarship (tuition, fees, room & board, and books) to any school in the country, I'd buy her a car.

I didn't mention the part about a trust fund had already been established for our daughter that had—at that time—almost half of a million dollars in it for whatever she wanted to do with her life. Did I mention that McKayla made us a very good living as a financial planner?

Four years later, after receiving an academic free ride to the pre-med program at Duke, I offered to take her to any car dealer she wanted that was within a reasonable budget to pick out her new ride. Do you know what my daughter did? She went into the garage and told me she wanted her Mom's old BMW convertible that neither of us could bear to part with.

Like McKayla, Maureen has this certainty about her. She knows exactly what to say or do. She has no moral ambiguity. When she makes up her mind, there's no changing it, unless you can prove that she's wrong, and even then, she's probably going to want to see the Boolean algebra you used.

So it was with a little bit of apprehension that I waited for whatever it was that my daughter had to say. She is not a fidgeter, but when she's nervous, she chews on her lip. Like my wife used to.

I could tell that she had played this conversation out in her head several times already, but was now coming up blank. After a false start or two, and a deep breath, she finally spoke.

"What was my dad like?"

Steadying myself against the kitchen counter, I let out a deep, sorrowful sigh. I, too, had played out this conversation in my head several times. Actually several hundred times, if not thousands.

This was the one day I had dreaded since I found out that I was pregnant.

McKayla and I raised Maureen as our daughter. Until she was about three, all she knew was that her parents loved her more than life itself. When she started going to preschool, she realised that our family was different from her friends's families. Very quickly, she put two and two together, but I guess because we tried to raise her in the most supportive and loving environment possible, she never really questioned us or our living arrangements.

When she got to middle school, she was teased and bullied a little, but like McKayla, Maureen doesn't suffer fools lightly and has no qualms about speaking her mind or verbally eviscerating someone who deserves it. Where I would have walked away or gone off on my own to brood, Maureen gave it right back, and by the time she got to high school, none of her friends thought twice about their friend and her two moms. Those who did had been taken care of already.

So what do you tell your daughter about a man who—through absolutely no fault of his own—has been entirely absent from her life from the day following her conception?