I’d left several phone messages but apparently, my godfather didn’t care to connect.

He lived in the Midwest, where he and my father had grown up and joined the service together, but after my baptism at old St. Pius, which I don’t remember, he dropped out of Dad’s life. According to Dad. Now, Dad had died. I thought Bill, my godfather, should know, and I wanted to tell him in person. And meet him for the first time.

I drove a thousand miles back to my birthplace. There I staked out the humble brick home where Bill and his wife, Frannie (who was not my godmother), had lived their entire adult lives.

It was a summer evening with cicadas roaring in the humid trees like evacuation traffic.

“I’m Dave,” I said when an octogenarian fellow answered the door. “Your godson?”

The door closed in my face.

—

I came back the next morning, bearing coffee cake from the bakery Dad always said was Bill’s favorite. This time I knocked on the door and held up the pastry box to show Bill or Frannie that I came in peace.

It was Frannie who let me in. As ancient as her husband and bent like a well handle, she muttered “I guess it was bound to happen eventually” as she guided me toward the kitchen in the back of the house.

The house smelled of minty liniments.

There at a small Formica-topped table sat the old man from the night before, already shaking his head.

“Hi. I brought you some Fugazzi’s.”

“Screw Fugazzi’s,” Bill said. “What the hell do you want?”

—

It was difficult to sit there in Bill and Frannie’s hot summer kitchen, with the uneaten coffee cake now on a plate and congealing before us, and listen to their itemized grievances re: my father.

He had done a few things to earn the estrangement with my godfather.

The list of grievances went on and on in that hot summer kitchen.

—

Beyond many reckless misdemeanors, it seems my father had borrowed a significant amount of money from Bill—after my baptism—to help him and Mom “start fresh somewhere,” said Bill. His cataract glasses were so thick I couldn’t judge the drift of his emotions.

Then my father had moved his little family, including me—Baby David—to the nonspecific place “out west” that they, Bill and Frannie, never learned the specific name of.

Utah, I told them.

Maybe this history helped to explain why Dad hadn’t chosen Frannie to be my godmother. It was a troublesome mystery, though one that my godfather probably understood fully from their service days.

He said he had only agreed to be my godfather in the hopes that my dad would redeem himself one day. He hadn’t.

Instead, he ran away.

“Sorry to have to tell you your dad was a bastard,” Bill said.

“Well, he’s dead now, so.”

We sat there together nodding, then dug into that coffee cake.

– Kevin Brennan