When my dad was around, we would share tubs of Neapolitan ice cream—although he ate all the strawberry—while we watched TV. We’d go to 7-Eleven and get white powdered donuts and Slurpees, mixing up all the different flavors into a sweet, soothing concoction. But as I got older, I started to see the cracks in my idyllic life. One spring, when I was a Brownie, the Girl Scout Cookie money went missing. Sometimes my father went missing. One morning, my mother went out to get her car and it was gone: repossessed for lack of payment.
When I was about five or six, my parents and grandfather stood outside in our driveway having an animated conversation one afternoon. “Come inside, Hope,” Grandma said. “Come on, Marcus.”
We sat at the kitchen table, with an Etch A Sketch between us. “What else can you draw on that?” Grandma asked as soon as we finished a picture. She was trying to distract us from what was going on outside, but I could hear the angry voices. I knew something bad was happening. Grandpa Pete was very upset as he talked to my parents in front of the smiley face.
Later I learned that my father had taken my grandfather’s checkbook out of my grandparents’ home and stolen $1,800 by writing checks to himself. He told my grandfather he had been poking around in his private office because he wanted to take his guns, but they were all locked up. He found the checkbook instead.
My father moved out the day after the Etch A Sketch marathon. I didn’t get to say good-bye—he asked my mother if he could pick me up from school, but I was going to a friend’s house, so he said good-bye only to Marcus. My brother wanted to give Dad something to make him feel better, so he gave him the baseball he had hit for his first home run. Marcus signed it and added the date, the inning, and the ball-and-strike count of his home run. I felt guilty for years that I didn’t say good-bye to my father that day.
A short time later, we were evicted from the smiley-face house. We came home to find a sheriff standing in our front yard, saying we had to move. My father had never paid the mortgage, even though he told my mother that he had. She deposited money in their bank account, and he was supposed to pay the bills with it. To this day, she doesn’t know where the money went.
IV.
There was a lot we didn’t know about Gerry Solo. For one thing, that wasn’t his name. I found out later, through police reports, that his name was Jeffrey John Solo. Maybe. He had other names. One time, he hinted that his last name was really DeMatteo. Or was it really Beyers? In a police investigation, years later, we learned he had two social security numbers. He said he was from New York. He said his parents were from Italy and came over in the 1880s. He was born sometime before World War II. He said he had an aunt but grew up in an orphanage in the Bronx. He had a brother named Marcus, who, he said, died in a parachuting accident in Vietnam. He may have been a loan shark in Boston. He may have had another family in Michigan.
How he got to Washington is also a mystery. He liked to hint that he had a criminal past, that he had been in the Mob. Maybe. Or maybe he wanted everyone to think he had. Maybe he was in the Witness Protection Program. He said he’d been a boxer and a semipro football player. He said he’d been in the navy and alluded to a tour of duty in Vietnam.
We did know this: he was tall and gregarious and loud. As a young man, he was extremely handsome, with classic Italian looks and a distinctive style, wearing leather loafers without socks. He oozed charisma. He had met his first Judy in the 1960s, while they were both working at Boeing, which pretty much rules out that tour in Vietnam. David was born in 1969 and Terry a few years later. Thanks to help from the first Judy’s parents, they lived on twenty acres in Carnation, Washington. They had horses, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and German shepherds. They lived in a little cabin while they had a house built, which was finished in 1976.
Around that time, he met the second Judy. My mom had been married briefly and was on the rebound. She was living in Everett, Washington, going to community college and teaching karate. She was a black belt, and that wasn’t the only tough thing about her back then: she also worked as the first female corrections officer in a men’s prison in Monroe. My dad met her in a karate class. They went out for drinks. She thought he was fun. He thought she was cute. Pretty soon she was pregnant with Marcus, and they bought a house in Marysville with big bay windows overlooking Puget Sound. So now he had two families and there might have been others.
The two Judys found out about each other when the first Judy found pictures of my mom and Marcus in the glove compartment of their car. My mom got a phone call from the other Judy. When it was all out in the open, my dad brought David and Terry to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to meet my mom and Marcus. Terry was thrilled to have a little brother. David was confused. Both Judys were intertwined—to my father and each other—forever because of their children.
And then my father was
