In the years after my father’s death, Shirley and I had grown increasingly connected. We spoke by phone often, and many times she had told me that she’d promised my father she’d look out for me. Though Shirley was my father’s younger sister, she had always been his protector, and he had turned to her in times of emotional peril. It was she he had called when he learned that his young fiancée was terminally ill. It was she to whom he had confessed, in later years, his unhappiness in his marriage to my mother. During the time that my father and mother struggled to have a baby, he might have
...more
