“Training?” he mocks. “To give love to frightened pets who are caged up, waiting for treatment, feeling abandoned? She was a fast learner when it came to my dog. Where’d she come from, by the way?”

Startled, I’m silent for a breath. Then I echo, “Come from?” I hope he doesn’t mean what I think. “New York. With me.”

“But who’s her father?”

Bingo. That’s my Jack, filtered not. There are any number of answers I might give to succinctly end the conversation. Lord knew, I’ve used many of them over the years. But strangers with inappropriate questions are one thing, Jack Sabathian another. I never lied to him. He might have thought it. But what I said about my father was what I believed.

Honestly now, I say, “I have no idea.”

“Really? You?”

I don’t bother to answer. He’s thinking I was drunk, which goes to show how faulty memory can be. I didn’t drink. Never had. There was nothing spontaneous or irresponsible or unplanned about conceiving Joy, and it had been worth every terrifying minute.

“One-night stand?” he asks.

“Sperm donor,” I reply.

That draws a curious half smile splitting dark stubble, which the moon appears just in time to reveal. “Seriously?”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he says without missing a beat, “you can have any man you want. Why use a donor?”

“Maybe,” I say without missing my own beat, “because I don’t like the men who want me, but I wanted a child.”

“Does she know?”

“Absolutely. Joy and I know how to communicate. I told her as soon as she was old enough to understand.” Not making the same mistakes my parents did, my mind adds, and he hears that part, too.

His voice is faintly subdued. “Was it hard?”

“The telling? No harder than explaining adoption. ‘Mommy had a gazillion choices, but she wanted you.’”

“It’s different from adoption.”

“You know what I mean. There’s a similar issue of Doesn’t he want to know who I am?”

I feel a niggling of guilt, thinking of all the times my daughter has asked this. But no. She accepts. She understands, and only in part from the books we read of the why-don’t-I-have-a-daddy type. In time she came to see how many of her friends were being raised by single parents, making me no different at all. But my niggling remains. It’s the guilt that I feel, me, personally. It’s in subjecting my daughter to the same insecurity I felt myself about my own roots.

But this is the memory that’s just beyond my grasp, and curt Jack isn’t done with his questions.

“Doesn’t he? Want to know her?”