Poor little guy’s the product of a one-night stand after an AA meeting, Boss Lady told me during the job interview. Said a second cousin up in Eureka Springs had called out of the blue, half-drunk and totally pregnant, blubbering and begging her to adopt. Why’d she say yes? Status symbol? Loneliness? Hell, why does anybody have kids? I just know she was a forever-single middle-aged corporate attorney who worked whenever she was awake. It bought her a half-empty mansion on Swiss Avenue with the windows painted shut, and a six-figure SUV in the three-car garage… and me, the forever-single manny. Next best thing to a wife.

We’ve had a few gals who didn’t stick, she said, and my son could probably use a positive male role model.

I held my violet fingernails up to my stubble and rhinestone stud earrings and said, I’m not exactly what most people have in mind when they hear that term.

Boss Lady expelled a horselaugh, told me I’d aced the background check, said my last family said they would’ve kept me forever if their daughters hadn’t grown up. Now if you can just get Tom to put on some weight, she continued, he’s in one of the lowest percentiles, he rarely wants to eat anything besides fruit.

I lived with them for more than a year, shopping and cooking, going to the playground and the pediatrician, reading bedtime stories. Drove him to and from the half-day Christian preschool, even did a parent-teacher conference. Tom tells the other children you’re his dad, a twitchy young woman said during that meeting. I faked a grimace. While glowing inside.

He understood, of course, that I was just a manny. But still didn’t know, as his fifth birthday approached, that his mom had adopted him. And neither of us knew he had an 18-year-old half-brother. Everything started coming unglued on a September evening, when we were gorging on watermelon instead of the high-protein organic vegan stuff I was supposed to be feeding him. I recall looking over at the landline right before the ring. It was the brother, who’d discovered the family tie while farting around on Fakebook. His name was Tom, too—not quite as queer as it sounds, since he’d also been adopted at birth. He was itching to meet. Do you know where Dinosaur Valley is? he asked. Or the nuclear plant? I’m caretaking a ranchette out here. It’s just a couple hours from Dallas, if you don’t hit traffic.

We’ll get back to you, I said when the call was ending. When Tom asked who I’d been talking to, I lied. Claimed it was an old sweetheart of mine.

He has the same name as me?

Stranger things have happened, my friend. Now it’s time for your bath.

Once he was asleep, I got on that infernal Fakebook myself and figured out Boss Lady knew about Big Tom. So I punched in his number. All gut, no deliberation. A terrible idea that I don’t regret.

The following Saturday morning, as soon as she took off for a law firm retreat in Hawaii, I leveled with the boy. We were in the kitchen. He started shivering, jumped into my arms. Wouldn’t even touch the blueberry muffins that I was pulling out of the oven. So we hit the road.

Coming up the ranch drive I saw a familiar-looking towhead across the way, cradling something in his right arm, reaching into a small tree with his left. Stop, Little Tom screamed, and I did, and he bolted from his booster seat. Big Tom turned out to be holding a tiny pink porker, and the two of them fed it from that tree—Mexican persimmons, purplish-black balls about the size of cherry tomatoes. Runt of the litter, the young man explained when greeting me. I’m a congenital smart-ass and replied, Gonna take an awful long time to fatten him up that way. Big Tom’s face blossomed as he squeezed the critter. Sir, he said, don’t you know time ain’t nothin’ to a hog?

I had to come clean with Boss Lady, of course. It wasn’t like I could tell either boy to keep the trip secret. Twelve years it’s been since she fired me. Since that last Little Tom hug broke me, turned me into a long-haul truck driver. She did let him call every once in a while, and got him his own phone before he was out of grade school. I heard from him just the other day. Said he was living on the ranch now with Big Tom and Big Tom’s wife, who were expecting a baby. Said he was heading out to the persimmon tree. Said he was gonna make some jam.