Everything Changes

nanny thrown in for good measure, and as far as they’re all concerned, I’m a devoted father taking time off work to play with my daughter. Or else I’m unemployed, which makes me somewhat pathetic. But maybe I’m just self-employed, an author or a musician, and thus able to put in this quality time on a regular basis. I wear no ring, so I’m divorced or maybe a widower, and either way that hikes up my appeal quotient.
    Tamara didn’t want children, but Rael wore her down. That was his specialty. He was the consummate salesman. Ice cubes to Eskimos and all that. So they had Sophie, and then Rael died, leaving Tamara alone with the lifetime commitment he’d talked her into. Since Sophie was only ten months old when he died, I am now the closest thing to a father figure that she has, and while that’s tragic, I can’t deny that I enjoy the sense of pride and possessiveness I have when it comes to her. When she finally acquiesces to being removed from the swing, she hugs me snugly, and I run my free hand along the soft, plump skin of her narrow, unformed shoulders. The aroma of baby shampoo and lotion fills my nostrils, and when she rests her cheek on my shoulder, it feels perfect, like each was designed specifically to fit the other, a matching set. Holding her like this, I feel trusted and reliable and altogether more useful than at any other time in my life.
    “ABCDEFG,” she sings into my ear, her voice high, sweet, and cutely off-key.
    “How I wonder what you are,” I sing back. It’s our little game.
    “QRSTUV,” she sings.
    “Like a diamond in the sky.”
    She laughs, from her belly, and it’s more musical than her singing. “Zap funny.”
    Zap is funny. Zap has the hots for your mother, who, even if she weren’t too wrapped up in the tragic clusterfuck of her own life to notice, would probably be out of his league anyway. And she’s the wife of his best friend, which comes with a whole other set of complications, not to mention the minor fact that Zap is, in fact, engaged to another woman, and thus ineligible for competition to begin with. Zap has got himself caught in a theoretical love triangle, although it’s really more like a love square, since Rael’s presence can’t be discounted, even in death. And just to spice things up further, to juice up the sitcom of his life for sweeps week, Zap may have a malignant tumor in his bladder, which, if true, will throw a colossal monkey wrench into the proceedings.
    “Zap funny,” Sophie says again, giggling tiredly and clutching my chin in her little fingers.
    I grab her hand and press her palm against my cheek. “Yeah,” I say. “Zap hysterical.”

    Later, Tamara and I sit outside, in the porch swing Rael ordered from a SkyMall catalog while on a business trip. We sit in the fading afternoon light, not because it’s particularly scenic or to enjoy the weather, which is actually overcast and unseasonably muggy for October, but because Sophie fell asleep in the stroller on the walk home and she doesn’t transfer well. If we attempt to move her to the crib, she’ll wake up screaming and refuse to be put down for a half hour. I’d like to think that, like me, Tamara wants Sophie to keep sleeping because she cherishes our quiet time together, but the truth is, she just doesn’t want to deal with a screaming baby. She knew in advance she wasn’t mother material, but Rael assured her that she’d fall in love and that would all change. He was old-fashioned enough to think that all women are mothers waiting to emerge, and he didn’t live long enough to be disabused of that notion. In actuality, Tamara dotes on Sophie, but she clings to the bad-mommy act as a way of dealing with her feelings of maternal inadequacy.
    “So what’s going on with you?” Tamara says.
    I tell her about the blood in my piss and the bright spot on my ultrasound. “Tomorrow I have to go back for a cystoscopy,” I tell her.
    Hope would want to know the statistics, the odds. She would want me to run the scenarios, would talk about specialists and delve into family histories. Tamara just nods and says, “Are you scared?”
    “Of cancer?”
    “Of the procedure.”
    I think about it for a minute. “Yes,” I say. “I guess I am.”
    “Do you want me to come with you?”
    I do. Not because I need her to but because her offer underscores our closeness and, since I’m such a geek, this casual recognition thrills me even though I know it in no way validates my