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“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have wanted to have children with past me, either. I was a mediocre husband and would have been a terrible father in my thirties. I was too married to my work.”
“Upside of the heart attack is that you get a second chance to try being married to a girl instead of a grill.” She makes a silly face.
“Terrible.” I shake my head. “But I’m not there yet. I haven’t figured out who I am if I can’t be a chef and restaurateur.”
Mags cups her mouth like she’s making a megaphone, then stage whispers, “Romance audiobook narrator.”
I roll my eyes.
She laughs. “Can you imagine? Going to school for that show and tell things kids do, when they bring a parent to talk about their job?” She changes her voice to sound like she’s a little girl. “This is my dad. He reads kissing books to mommies who want to escape from dirty laundry and get dirty with pretend daddies. So gross.”
“You’re a goof.”
“Or … you could be a sperm donor. You’d be a great catch.”
“Seems too weird to me that there are guys out there who have like a dozen genetic kids and don’t know who they are … I couldn’t do it. I’d need to know any child of mine was healthy and happy, you know? Eating their vegetables.”
“Aw.”
“Do donors get any say in who gets to use their sperm?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How did it work for you? Were you given a menu to choose from, like at Subway, but instead of ordering your hoagie exactly how you want it, you order up your perfectly put together human?”
“You laugh, but it pretty well was like that. I got to choose the sperm donor’s ethnic and cultural background, eye color, hair color, height and weight, education and occupation. They write essays about their family and they even had these audio files so I could hear their voices.”
“That’s wild.”
“It was pretty fun, actually.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did you choose? What menu options? Did you choose a guy you’d have wanted to date or even marry if you could?”
Mags scrunches her face, as if my question smells like moldy cheese.“No. I mean, I have, I had, no interest in actually sharing this baby—these babies, as it turns out—so that was never part of my decision-making.”
“So, how did you decide? Seems like a big decision to just throw a dart at the wall.”
Magdalena looks me right in the eye. “If I tell you, you have to promise me that you will never, ever get drunk and tell my mother.”
“I swear.”
“I was a high school prom night, oops. According to Mom, she went to prom with this guy she barely knew. So, when she figured out she was … with me, she decided not to ruin the guy’s life. She’d already moved away to go to university, so she just didn’t go home until I was like four or five and by then, nobody would have ever put together the night it happened and who the dad was.”
“Your mom had you while she was in college?”
“I got my first degree before I even started kindergarten. At least, I attended all the classes. I was advanced for my age,” she jokes.
“I have no doubt. But that doesn’t tell me how you chose your sperm donor.”
“Right. Fifteen years ago, something like that, we were visiting my mom’s folks and I found her high school yearbook in the attic. I never told her I saw it.” She points at me to emphasize that we’re entering the secret phase of her story. “There was a picture of a bunch of kids on grad night. I figured out who Mom’s date was, what his name was. I found him … online, at least.”
“Did you connect with him? What did he say?”
