Significant Others Read Online Free Page A

a cramped condo in Millennium Gardens.
    “Stanley Palladino was a good dad,” I said, feeling the need to defend my father, especially now that he was gone. Why hadn’t he been enough for my brother?
    “You don’t have to tell me,” Donny said, “but he wasn’t my real dad.” Donny lowered his voice so our mother wouldn’t overhear. He had heard the story; we both had, more times than we can count.
    My dad adopted Donny and gave him his name when he married my mother. She and her baby boy were making a new life for themselves when they moved from Pittsburgh with my grandmother and Mom’s younger sister—my Aunt Helene—to Atlanta, where she took a job as a typist at my dad’s real estate agency. She worked herself up to agent, and after a couple of years of courting, she agreed to marry him. The rest, as my dad used to say, was history. My birth was part of their history.
    “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” Stanley Palladino was fond of saying when he told the story of their romance. “She was prettier than any model on the pages of a fashion magazine. She refused to marry me so many times I stopped counting, but I never stopped asking. Then one day when I arrived at her apartment for dinner, little Donny greeted me at the door and said his first words, ‘Da Da.’ Your mother burst into tears. I’ll never forget that night. I caught her at her weakest point and closed the sale,” Stanley grinned. “She finally said yes. Of course, I’d been carrying the ring around in my pocket for more than a year. Let that be a lesson to you, Honey,” he used to say, tapping a long finger to my nose. “Persistence pays.”
    Speaking of my nose, sometimes I think Donny is lucky. Maybe it would have been nice to have been adopted. It would be handy to have a non-existent parent where I could lay the blame for my physical flaws. This nose? It must have come from my real father. Stanley Palladino’s nose looked just fine on Stanley Palladino, but on me, it was a different story. And there was absolutely no way to get past my fat ass, literally or figuratively. That big butt? Right again. My real mother.
    Actually, I got my tendency for substantial hips from Grandma Lewis, my mother’s mother. Probably as a result of the eight years she lived with us and admonished Donny, Helene, and me to “eat everything on your plate because the children in Europe are starving.” Grandma Lewis must have been the founding member of the clean plate club. I’d spent most of my adult life fighting the Lewis genes so I could fit into my own jeans. Thank God for Talbots® Woman. Other than Mom, I didn’t really know where Donny’s genes originated. But Donny was pretty much perfect in my eyes and owed no apologies to anyone. Everyone adored Donny, and I got to bask in the glow of that adoration, so I couldn’t complain. Even though it was obvious everyone preferred Donny.
    I picked up a picture of Donny and my dad that sat on the pass-through between the kitchen and the living room. Donny was probably eight years old when that picture was taken, dressed in a dirty Little League uniform, with smudges all over his face. It was taken right after his team had won the championship game and my dad was beaming into the camera, bursting with fatherly pride.
    Stanley Palladino was thrilled to have a son. He took Donny to Little League, taught him how to throw a ball, went to all his high school baseball games, and was as proud as any father when Donny, the hottest prospect in the country, was recruited by the coach of one of the top SEC East teams and later as a pitcher for his first major league team. But as much as Donny loved Stanley Palladino, I knew that my brother still secretly longed for his own father, even after all these years. Donny was a grown man, but he couldn’t stop searching for clues and connections, no matter how tenuous, to a man he never knew.
    Stanley Palladino’s death forced him to lose a