I referred to my stepfather as the Peanut Man for the majority of my kindergarten year. He hadn’t married in at that point, but his basketball shorts were in my mother’s closet and his mixed nuts in our cupboard. Nobody ate nuts but him. Thus, Peanut Man. 

I still call him Jeff, but his name is on the mortgage and he came to my senior night for soccer. He moved me into college. He is my grade-school caricature, acclimated. We say “I love you” if I say it first. 

Remarriage complicates love. Jeff’s introduction to me wasn’t watching his wife tear top-to-bottom to push out a product of them, but rinsing my blueberry-dyed vomit from Dora bedsheet while my mom scraped my crusted body with a washrag in a home that wasn’t yet his. Our later-than-at-birth meeting makes me question if my footsteps, toddling down the hall, spoiled their nights, if my tantrums, my inability to pack suitcases without help, my middle school birthday parties, interrupted his nirvana.

My mother, sister, and father all have brown eyes, but Jeff’s and mine are blue. I’m not his, but I savor how such a detail unites us. It feels like a piece of his ethos I might claim—a means of identifying, a whisper of security, assurance that I’ll someday belong in his obituary even if I’m not meant for his will. 

After my mom, my dad dated once. He broke up with her (Deb—we’re Facebook friends now) after a year because he couldn’t say “I love you” back. I grieved her departure, but I didn’t feel motherless without her. I doubt the inverse would have been true if my mom kicked out Jeff. 

My dad referred to Jeff as son-of-a-bitch when I was six and he told us about my mother’s affair. I remember crying because I thought I had to, aware that such a detail complicated and spoiled our home’s mosaic, scared that it meant Jeff couldn’t ‘count’ for me, nor I for him. My sister hissed at my mother during the driveway hand-off: Did you cheat on dad with Jeff? I think my dad felt threatened by him, like he needed the slander to either preserve his relationship with us or prevent ours with Jeff—maybe both. Neither worked. 

I’ve asked my mom more about the affair as I’ve gotten older. It was a stupid decision, but I’ve tried to make it as right as I could. I think she did; it wouldn’t please any priest for them to remedy their sin with more divorce. My father is vasectomized, gambling, retired, and Jeff’s ex-wife is withering from ALS. As their past loves have dwindled, their marriage has strengthened—grown with them—vindicated in a pre-nup, sweetened by frames like Christmas morning as I watch Jeff ceremonially unwrap a canister of peanuts; in every card I’ve received since elementary school, signed “love Mom and Jeff” in my mother’s script; in the lawn clippings I don’t have to drag to the burn pile because he knows I’ll catch poison ivy. This is the Peanut Man, reclined on our sectional, feeding me our financials for the FAFSA; peeking into my FaceTime calls with mom; beating me at every game of Bananagrams I’ve begun.

Can I claim him as a father? I nod in sermons that condemn divorce and I explain on theology exams that we reserve spousal legitimacy for round one. On a date in February, I told a boy that divorce wasn’t an option, and I smiled when he agreed. I admire the orthodoxy; I want to do things right; I also want to vindicate Jeff’s make-shift paternity. For 16 years I’ve gone home to not-dad when actual dad is only a mile down the road, and it feels right. There’s a disconnect between the exemplary and the actual, and the in-between is where grief festers, where uncertainty reigns, where questions of Am I allowed to approve of this? and Does this make him more my dad? echo in the confusion of the unideal. 

I want their remarriage to solidify something. I long for the right to lay my head on his shoulder, aware that I am splashing in fantasy. When he carries my suitcases inside and refills my windshield wiper fluid, Jeff is mine, and yet when I cover my face so as to not cry in front of a ‘stranger,’ when I sign my last name and remember the stale child support that funded my gym shoes and proms, he is a live-in. 

I struggle to articulate the slight of my unsettledness. I see how successfully rings can recirculate—my home is stable and my mother is in love—and yet even with Jeff’s consistency, his reassurance, his advice on investments and warm smiles toward my Fox News retorts—I feel like a bastard, drowned in surplus of almost-fathers, on the cusp of inner-rings and fenced off from privileges like one father-daughter wedding dance, clarity over who to call when a tire goes flat, unsure about which man my boyfriend needs to talk to when it’s time to propose.

I chose to hear implied “I love you’s” when I do not initiate the trade-off, to take two sets of family pictures at every event, to rehearse back to myself when I feel simultaneously fatherless and over-fathered that the bruises from do-overs heal into timid hues, and even those marks fade and fade and fade and fade and fade.

– Heidie Raine