My grandfather looked at me as if that was the first he had heard of it. “Well, whatever happened, the point is he didn’t decide against you. You—Maddy—had not come into being yet. He decided against an abstract idea. He might have regretted it ever since. We don’t know.”

“But anyway,” I persisted, “the fact is he didn’t want me. As an abstract idea. And now it turns out the universe doesn’t want me either. You can’t argue with that.”

But Grandpa was prepared to try. He launched into one of his long explanations about evolutionary change and variation and the way genetic accidents ensure that the species is strong in the long run.

“I get sick so everyone else can be healthy?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s not personal. There’s not someone out there giving Maddy a disease just to be mean. It’s the way nature works. It’s chance. Some people have diabetes and some people have weak hearts. Some people get cancer.”

He had said this before. I could never decide what I thought about it. I knew he meant it to be comforting, and I wanted it to be. But this idea of no one being responsible—not me, not my mother, not the doctors, not even God, if by any chance he exists—I found incredibly scary. I would prefer it if someone, somewhere, was making the decisions, even if what they decided, cruelly and maliciously or just indifferently, was to harm me. Otherwise, what is anything supposed to mean? Who is in charge?

“Okay, I get that.”

My grandfather returned his attention to the litter-speckled grass, his nostrils flared in relief, or in further thought, or in contempt for slapdash park maintenance.

“Grandpa, would you have abandoned your daughter?”

Mutely, he shook his head.

“And if you did abandon your daughter, would you want to know whether or not she even existed? Would you want to meet her? Or would you think, Oh, that has nothing to do with me?”

Barney was at our feet again with the slathery balls. Neither of us picked them up. He pranced back and forth, trying to thrust one into our hands; eventually he gave up and lay down.

“Let’s see,” said Grandpa in a helpless kind of voice, stalling for time.

“I mean, men should have an idea how other men think, shouldn’t they?”

He stretched his arm along the bench top. “I suppose they should.” He crossed his legs one way. “I suppose they should.” He recrossed them the other way.

I was about to repeat the question when, with his eyes not on me but on the buildings beyond the park, my grandfather said: “Well, why don’t you find out?”

“Find out what?”

“Find out what his thinking was.”

“Whose thinking?” I asked cautiously.

“Your biological father’s thinking.”

“Antonio, you mean?”