"No. I didn't wait. But I couldn't forget him either. Nine months later, you were born."
The silence returned, thicker than before.
"Did you try to contact him?" I asked.
"I tried. I called the number he'd given me. It didn't work. I searched phone directories, acting studios, production companies. Nothing. I asked at the workshop. No one knew who he was. It was like he'd vanished."
"And then?"
"Then I met Mark. And life went on. You grew. And I... I kept Joey's story in a drawer. Took it out sometimes, to look at it. To remember."
"And now? Do you still have the story in the drawer?"
Susan came closer. She sat beside me on the couch. Took my hands in hers.
"The story is still there. And if you want, we can open the drawer. We can look for Joey. Find your father. But you need to know one thing."
"What?"
"I don't know if he'll want to be found. I don't know if he'll want to be your father. And I don't know if, after all these years, he'll be there. Like Javier. Promising to come back. And then not coming back."
"And if he is like that?"
"Then you'll have to decide if you want to wait. Like Jay. Sitting at the door, watching the street, waiting for someone who said they'd come back to come back."
I didn't say anything. Words stuck in my throat, not because I didn't know what to say, but because anything I said would be a lie or would be cruel.
"Do you want us to look for him?" Susan asked.
I thought for a moment. About Manny, sitting on the floor of his room, moving the knight on the chessboard. About Jay, waiting at the door with his arms crossed. About Javier, promising he'd try and then disappearing.
"Not yet," I said. "Maybe later. When I'm older. When I'm ready to meet him. Or for him to meet me."
"What if he never finds you?"
"Then I'll be like Jay. I'll sit at the door with Gloria and Manny, and I'll wait. But I won't let the waiting hurt me."
Susan hugged me. Mark came over and put his hand on my shoulder. And the three of us stayed like that on the couch, with the streetlights coming through the window, with the echo of a story that was just beginning to be told.
That Night
I stayed awake long after my parents went to sleep.
The house was quiet. The lights in the Dunphy house were off. Alex was surely asleep. But I couldn't close my eyes.
Joseph Francis Tribbiani. Joey.
The name circled in my head like a catchy song. An actor from Queens. Seven sisters. A smile that made everyone laugh. My mother had described him with affection, as if he were a character from a comedy. Someone who passed through life leaving laughter and then moved on without looking back. Like Javier. Like Manny's father, who arrived on a motorcycle, promised to stay, and then disappeared. And Jay stayed waiting at the door, arms crossed, looking at the empty street.
And maybe he was a comedy character.
In my previous life, in the hospital, I spent hours watching TV. The shows blurred together, fuzzy from the morphine. But there was one that came back again and again. It was called Friends. I never saw it all the way through. Just fragments, scattered scenes, clips uploaded to the internet. But there was one character who always appeared. An Italian actor from Queens. Obsessed with food and women. Clumsy. Loyal. Heart in the right place. The comic relief who always said "How you doin'?" with a smile that disarmed anyone.
His name was Joey.
The memories came in bursts. Joey eating a giant sandwich, shouting he didn't share food. Joey on a soap opera, playing a neurosurgeon, writing his own dialogue because he didn't like what they gave him. Joey speaking fake French that sounded like Chinese. Joey crying because his best friend was moving away with the woman he loved, and he couldn't imagine life without him. Joey offering to marry a friend who was pregnant and alone, so her daughter would have a father. He was the one who was always there. The one who never left. The one who, at the end of the series, stayed alone in the apartment he'd shared with his best friend. With the same furniture, the same foosball table, the same stuffed penguin on the bed. Everyone else had left. He stayed.
That was Joey.
But the Joey from real life—the one my mother had met—had left one night after coffee and promises. And then nothing. A phone number that didn't work. An acting workshop where no one knew who he was. A guy who passed through my mother's life like a meteor and disappeared, leaving half a story and a son who never knew he existed.
I sat up in bed.
Could it be the same one? The one from the show, from TV. It was ridiculous. Fiction. But I was in Modern Family. I had been reborn in a world I had once seen on a screen. Alex was real. The Dunphys were real. Phil was the clumsiest dad in the universe. Jay softened for Manny. Gloria made everyone tremble. All of that had been fiction once. And now it was real.
Why couldn't that other world be real too? Why couldn't it be that my biological father was that Joey? The Italian from Queens. The one with seven sisters. The one who always stayed. But this time, without meaning to, without knowing, he had left. And if he knew he had a son, he would do anything for him. Like in the show. Like the Joey on TV.
I lay down again. Closed my eyes. The name kept circling. Joseph Francis Tribbiani. Joey. The one who promised to come back and didn't. The one who, somewhere in New York or Los Angeles, was still making people laugh, not knowing he had a son who also wanted to learn to laugh.
I fell asleep with the name in my mouth, like a prayer, a promise, a question I didn't know if I'd ever answer.
Outside, the street remained silent. The Dunphy house stayed dark.
And somewhere, in some parallel universe, an Italian actor from Queens kept saying "How you doin'?" with a smile that disarmed anyone.
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