Free Stepdog by Mireya Navarro Page A

long after I had gone to bed, my mom called with the grave news. He may not make it, she said. In a fog of sleeplessness and worry, I found a flight from Miami, and Bill, the publicist for GGW creator Joe Francis, drove me to the airport when it was still dark. He took care of my rental car as I rushed to catch my plane. One minute I was hanging out with naked drunks, the next I was racing death. Death won. My mom and her cousin Lydia were waiting for me when I stepped out of baggage claim, and they didn’t have to say anything. My mom and I hugged and cried for Rafael Navarro Gonzalez, husband of fifty-one years, father and Korean War veteran, dead at seventy-six.
    My father’s long illnesses had given my mom, my sister, and me a chance to love him without recrimination. He was a different man sick and sober. My mom, especially, took solace in having sacrificed her quality of life doing everything she could to take care of him until the end. As for me, any leftover anger, any sense of shame, dissipated as if by magic the more vulnerable he became. His illness gave me a chance to get reacquainted with my real father. By the time my father left us, he and I had made our peace. After he died, all I felt was tenderness, all I could remember was the good. My father listening to Jim’s proposal with a look of amusement and wonder in equal parts. My father joyously holding his newborn grandsons. My father driving me to my seven a.m. physics class at the University of Puerto Rico in his clunky blue Datsun. My father asking me to pick the horses in his
papeleta
during my trips home because he said I brought him luck. My father and I dancing salsa like pros at our extended family’s house parties.
    One day not long after we buried him in the family plot with his parents, a long-forgotten moment pushed forth. I was sitting on my father’s lap as a little girl not yet old enough to read, listening to him read the
Blondie
comic strip in the newspaper. It was a Sunday ritual. I caught him making stuff up as a joke and told him to stop it in a scolding tone and to read the real thing. I kept a close eye on Dagwood and Blondie, who in the Spanish version were Lorenzo y Pepita, to make sure his words matched the drawings. And I caught him again fooling around! I protested until he finally gave up and read the words, which felt right but were not as satisfying as the belated love they would inspire decades later.
    My sister and I initially worried about my mother, but she was eager to resume her life—as a woman in her seventies with a zest for a new, it’s-all-about-me chapter. She traveled, she shopped, she hung out with Las Muchachas. And above all, she now could devote herself full-time to being a grandmother. My sister, by now separated from her husband, and her kids lived above our family house in their own apartment. My mother watched the kids after school, until my sister came home from work. With my dad gone, my mom was terrified of facing the nights alone. She bribed her grandsons with treats, whatever it took, so that one of them always stayed downstairs with her overnight.
    I returned to the States to write about Joe Francis’s soft-porn empire and to plan my move. Bill, the publicist with a heart, became a lifelong friend. Good-bye again, New York! Hello again, California!

Six
    Evil Stepmother, Here I Come

    M y move to California was relatively painless. Jim and I agreed that I should keep my apartment in New York, since we were certain we would end up back there at some point. My place—
our
place—would be an anchor. In the New York real estate market, once you’re out, you’re likely to be priced out when you come back and try to find similar digs. That’s how I ended up on the upper tip of Manhattan after I came back from Miami in the late 1990s. Five years later, I couldn’t afford to buy or rent in my old Upper West Side neighborhood. But Miami’s dirt-cheap