Free Stepdog by Mireya Navarro

fitting metaphor for our future. Eventually we walked to the museum restaurant with views of the Santa Monica Mountains for dinner, but I could not take my eyes off my engagement ring throwing off brilliant rays of light from the candles.
    That night in bed, I went from ecstasy to dread. Was I really ready for marriage—specifically, for the drastic transition to wife and stepmother, for the responsibility of other people’s happiness? I quickly shoved the negative thoughts away. Of course I was. Jim and I were mature, intelligent adults. We could handle anything. He’d help me.
    A more formal proposal came a few months later, when the next New Year’s Eve rolled around and Jim and I flew to Puerto Rico so he could ask my father for my hand in marriage the old-fashioned way. I knew that over the years my poor parents worried that I’d forever be alone. No husband, no kids, just my pen and reporter’s notebook. My father once—helpfully, he thought—suggested I fix a semi-crooked front tooth. I sometimes wondered if he thought I was a lesbian. But by now, my father had mellowed. For several years he had been dealing with cirrhosis and kidneys so battered he needed dialysis. He had been so sick that my mom held their fiftieth-anniversary party one year early, just in case.
    But on this night of my visit with Jim, in the sit-in kitchen that served as the gathering point in the house and where my father sat in a favorite chair by the window, he was all smiles as Jim stood, nervous again, holding a piece of paper. My sister had put out chairs for herself, the kids, and a girlfriend, who happened to be visiting, to witness the occasion. They sat with giggles and smiles, waiting for this real-life telenovela moment. Jim’s bilingual college buddy Alan had translated his presentation into Spanish and, with surprisingly good pronunciation, my fiancé made his intentions clear.
    â€œI fell in love with a truly wonderful woman,” he said, enunciating every word. “Each day I spend with her I feel like a winner at the racetrack.”
    Nice touch! My horse-gambling father was moved and couldn’t give me away fast enough. Jim would forever remember the occasion as a scene from a Gabriel García Márquez novel—asking for my hand while half of Lorenzo Noa Street gathered to watch, unnerving him even as they enveloped him in congratulations and good wishes.
    We still needed to figure out how we could be together, though. I halfheartedly looked around for other job possibilities on the West Coast, but I couldn’t imagine not working for the
Times
. At the moment, I was covering sex and nightlife, a beat concocted out of the Metro desk’s imagination. After so many years as a newswoman, I loved the change of pace and the challenge of trying to write about tawdry subjects without tawdriness. After all, my first front page story for the paper—the one I got on a metal plate from the printing plant per
Times
tradition—was about the “nuisance” of men “urinating in public.”
    Just as I was losing heart that the paper would accommodate me, the top editors cleared the way for my move. I was relieved and grateful when the paper transferred me to the L.A. bureau as the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Styles section. At least my professional life would stay the course while my personal life shifted entirely.
    Before my move, I went to Florida to report on the lingering phenomenon of Girls Gone Wild, the video series featuring college girls and young women inexplicably willing to flash their breasts on the street or the beach for the cameras. The story was pegged to the series’ newer incarnation—Guys Gone Wild, which featured college boys and young guys baring their crotches. As I spent one night trailing cameramen through spring-break hotels and bars in Daytona Beach, my father went to the hospital in Puerto Rico in a catatonic state. Not