where-My dad introduced my stepbrother’s baby as our first grandchild at the christening…

My dad introduced my stepbrother’s baby as our first grandchild at the christening…

My dad introduced my stepbrother’s baby as our first grandchild at the christening, with my three-year-old holding his hand. The priest looked down at my son, then at my dad, and asked if he’d like to try that again. It was cold on the church steps that Sunday, March 15th. March in Green Bay is still winter, no matter what the calendar says, and everybody was standing around in good coats with their breath showing, waiting for the photographer to get the light right.

My son Casper had his hand wrapped around two of my father’s fingers. He’d been holding on like that since we came out of the church. He loves his grandpa. He’s three, and to a three-year-old, a grandma Grandpa is the tallest man in the world. The photographer said, Okay, let’s get Grandpa with the grandbabies.

My father bent down and lifted my stepbrother’s baby girl out of her mother’s arms. Tinley, nine weeks old, in a long white christening gown that hung down over his arm. He held her up against his chest and smiled at the little crowd on the steps. Everybody, he said, meet our first grandchild. Casper was still holding his other hand.

He looked up at my father’s face, waiting to be counted. I stood there on the bottom step and felt the cold go right through my coat. Father Hoffman was standing at the church door. in his white vestments. He’s been a priest for 31 years. He baptized my son in the same font, in the same church, seven months earlier.

And my father had stood beside him that day as Casper’s godfather. Father looked down at the little boy holding my father’s hand. Then he looked up at my father. Andre, he said. Would you like to try that again? It got very quiet on those steps. My father laughed.

He laughed like it was a joke and said, Father, you know what I mean? And turned toward the camera. The photographer took the picture. I have it now. It’s the only picture I’ve ever seen where my father is smiling and my son is not. Six weeks later, that same priest stood in that same church and read something out loud that made my father turn around in the front pew.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Tomas Richter. I’m 36. I’m a union electrician in Green Bay, and I’ve been pulling wire in paper mills and hospitals and grocery stores since I finished my apprenticeship. My wife, Michaela, is 35. She owns a little flower shop on the east side. We got married in 2018 in the same church where all of this happened.

We tried for a baby for four years. I won’t go into it. Anybody who’s been through it knows, and anybody who hasn’t doesn’t need the details. By 2023, we’d stop trying. And Michaela said something one night at the kitchen table that changed our lives. She said, there are kids in this county right now who need a home tonight.

Why are we waiting for one that doesn’t exist yet? We did the classes. We did the home study. We got licensed as a foster home through Brown County that fall. In July of 2024, a caseworker called on a Tuesday afternoon and said she had an 18-month-old boy who needed a placement that night. His name was Casper.

He came to our door at 7 o’clock with a caseworker, a garbage bag of clothes and one stuffed dog with the ear chewed off he didn’t talk for three weeks he didn’t cry either which was worse he just watched us then one morning i was making eggs and he walked into the kitchen in his pajamas and he put his arms up at me and said up that was it for me i was done 11 months later on june 12 2025 a judge in the brown county courthouse signed the adoption decree and casper was ours legally permanently forever michaela cried through the whole hearing i held it together until the judge let

casper bang the gavel and then i was gone too. I need to tell you about my father, because none of this makes sense unless you know who he was to me. My dad was my hero, I mean that plainly. He worked 34 years at the paper mill on the Fox River, and retired as a shift supervisor. He was the kind of man other men called when their furnace quit, or their truck wouldn’t start.

He taught me to wire a lamp when I was nine. He took me ice fishing on the bay every winter weekend of my childhood, and we’d sit in that shanty for hours with a thermos of coffee and a radio playing the Packers game, and not say ten words, and it was the best time in the world. Mom died of cancer in 2015. My father fell apart for about a year.

Then in 2017, he married Christina, a widow from our parish who’d brought him casseroles for 18 months straight. She’s 60 now. She’s alright. She came with a grown son, Corey, who’s 33, and a married daughter in Appleton with two little girls. Corey and his wife had Tinley on January 9th of this year. That was the christening. The first crack showed up when we told my father we were going to foster.

We were at his kitchen table. He listened to the whole thing. Then he set his coffee cup down and said, You don’t know what you’re getting, Tomek. You don’t know where these kids come from. I thought it was just old-fashioned worry. He was 61 then. I figured he’d come around the first time he met a real kid.

And he did come around, a little. He’d pick Casper up when we brought him over. He bought him a little plastic ice fishing pole the first winter. When we asked him to be Casper’s godfather at the baptism in August of 2025, he said yes, but he stood at the back of the courtroom on adoption day. He wouldn’t come up front for the picture with the judge.

And at the baptism, standing at the font beside Father Hoffman, he held my son the way you’d hold a pack. you were signing for, carefully, at arm’s length, like it might be addressed to somebody else. I told myself it was just how he was with babies. I told myself a lot of things. Then came Christmas Eve.

In our family, Christmas Eve is Wigilia, the big Polish supper, 12 dishes, the wafer, the empty chair for the stranger. My father’s done it every year of my life. He takes it seriously. He writes out little name cards for every place at the table in his careful block capitals. Last Christmas Eve, we walked in, and there were place cards for everybody.

Christina, Corey, and his wife, Christina’s daughter and her husband. and their two girls. Tinley, who was still two weeks from being born, had a card with baby written on it propped against a high chair. There was no card for Casper. There was a card for me and a card for Michaela. Between them, somebody had set up a folding chair.

The empty chair for the stranger was at the other end of the table with its own card. I stood there holding my son and looked at that folding chair. Christina saw my face and hurried over and said, Oh, your father must have just forgot honey here. And she grabbed a napkin and wrote Casper on it with a pen.

My father was at the stove. He didn’t turn around. So when my father stood on those church steps, March and said our first grandchild. It wasn’t the first time. It was just the first time he said it out loud in front of a priest. After Father Hoffman’s question, and my father’s laugh and the picture, Christina came down the steps to where I was standing.

She put her hand on my arm and leaned in close. Father misunderstood, she said. Andrzej meant the first grandchild in our family, you know, since we got married. I looked at her. Casper came to us in July of 2024. My father married her in 2017. Casper was a grandchild in her family for a year and a half before Tinley was born.

born there was no way to do that math where my son wasn’t first I didn’t say that I just nodded and picked Casper up the luncheon was at a supper club out on the west side a long table in the back room a relish tray brandy old fashions for the grown-ups when we walked in there was a smaller table set up by the window for the little kids Christina’s two granddaughters were already sitting at it with coloring books there was a place for Casper there too Tinley went around the big table from arm to arm my father held her the longest he walked her up and down by the window

showing her the snow Casper sat at the table and ate his chicken fingers and kept turning around in his chair to look at his grandpa. I wanted to stand up. I wanted to walk over to my father in the middle of that room and ask him what exactly he’d meant on those steps. I’d actually put my napkin down. Michaela put her hand on my knee under the table.

Not today, she whispered. It’s Cory’s baby’s day. If you do this now, you’re the one who ruined a christening. Please, Tomas. Not today. She was right, and I hated that she was right. Cory hadn’t done anything to us. His wife hadn’t done anything. That little girl in the white dress certainly hadn’t done anything.

So I picked my napkin back up and sat there for two hours and ate prime rib I couldn’t taste. On the drive home, Casper was quiet in his car seat for a long time. Then he said, Daddy? Yeah, buddy. Is Tinley Grandpa’s baby? Michaela looked at me. I kept my eyes on the road. She’s Grandpa’s grandbaby, I said.

Just like you. He thought about that. Then he said, Grandpa didn’t hold me. He didn’t say it sad. He said it the way three-year-olds say things, like he was reporting the weather. It was the worst sentence I’ve ever heard. I told myself my father was just old-fashioned. I told myself he’d warm up. I told myself a lot of things.

that month easter was april 5th we went to my father’s house after mass the way we always do ham pierogi the butter lamb on the table the kids hunted eggs in the backyard which still had old snow in the shade by the fence casper found 11 eggs and was so proud he could hardly breathe after dinner my father stood up at the head of the table and tapped his glass with a fork i’ve got something for the grandkids he said he had a little stack of cards in his hand nice ones with lambs on the front he’d opened a college savings account for each grandchild he said with a

thousand dollars in it to start he wanted them to know their grandpa believed in them. He handed a card to Corey for Tinley. He handed one each to Christina’s two granddaughters, who were five and seven, and who squealed even though they had no idea what a college savings account was. Then he sat back down. That was the whole stack.

Casper was sitting on my lap with his basket of eggs. He watched the other girls open their cards. He watched my father sit down. Then he looked at me. Everything in me wanted to say something. Right there, in front of everybody. Where’s his? I could feel the words in my mouth. But my son was sitting on my lap.

If I said it, it wouldn’t be a fight between me and- my father. It would be a fight about Casper over Casper’s head with Casper in the middle of it. Every adult at that table would turn and look at him. He’d be the problem in the room. He’s three. He doesn’t need to be the problem in anybody’s room. So I said, hey buddy, want to go count your eggs again? And I took him into the kitchen. On the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a fish was a photograph from Casper’s baptism in August.

It was my father in his good suit standing by the font. It had been cut with scissors. You could still see a little piece of Casper’s white sleeve at the edge and his tiny hand on my father’s lapel. The rest of him was gone. Casper saw it. He pointed. Daddy, why is my picture cut? I don’t know, buddy, I said. I did know.

We left right after that. I told Christina Casper was tired. On the way home, I drove to De Pere instead of going straight back. I needed to see my grandmother. My father’s mother is Babsia. That’s what everybody’s always called her, even the nurses. She was 92. She’d been in a nursing home in De Pere for three years since her hip.

Most days she was in and out. Some days she thought I was my father. Some days she thought it was 1970. That Easter afternoon, she was sitting up by the window in her pink cardigan, and when I walked in, she said, Tomas, right away. She knew me. Michaela took Casper down the hall to see the fish tank, and I sat by Babshia’s bed and held her hand.

She asked about Easter. I don’t know why I told her. I think I just needed to tell somebody who’d loved my father longer than I had. I told her about the steps, the cards, the photograph on the refrigerator with the scissors. She was quiet for a long time. She held my hand in both of hers. Her grip was stronger than it had any right to be.

Then she said it. Your father was ours the minute we held him, she said. Your grandfather never saw it. Don’t let him do it to that boy. I didn’t understand her I said do what Babsia held him when but she’d already gone somewhere else her eyes drifted to the window and she asked me if the ice was out on the lake yet and whether my grandfather had got the boat in the water on my way out I asked the nurse at the desk if Babsia had been confused lately some days she said she mixes up the years a lot I wouldn’t read too much into anything

so I didn’t that night I didn’t read anything into it at all two days later on April 7th I called my father I’d waited until Casper was asleep I sat out in my truck in the driveway so Michaela wouldn’t have to hear it my My father picked up on the second ring. Dad, I said, I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me.

Why didn’t Casper get a card? There was a pause. Tomek, he said, he’s a sweet kid. I like him fine, but he’s not blood. I’m just being honest. Somebody in this family has to be. Tinley isn’t your blood either, I said. Corey isn’t your son. You married his mother nine years ago. Tinley’s got no more of your blood than Casper does. Tinley came the normal way, my father said.

She’s Christina’s granddaughter. She was born into this family. You went down to the county and picked one out of a f- I sat there in my truck. He’s your grandson, I said. The judge signed it. You stood at the font. You’re his godfather, dad. I did that for you, he said. Not for him. And he hung up. I sat in the truck for a long time with the phone in my lap.

I kept hearing that phrase. Picked one out of a file. My father was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a cruel man. He’d never talked that way about anybody in my whole life. I couldn’t understand where it came from. I stopped taking Casper over there. I told myself I was protecting my son. I think I was also waiting for my father to call.

He didn’t. A week went by. Then two. For the- the first time in 36 years I didn’t talk to my father for 14 days. The only person from that side of the family who came to see us was Corey. He showed up on a Saturday morning, the second week, with Tinley asleep in her car seat and a coffee in each hand. I’d never had a real conversation with him in nine years.

He was always just Christina’s son, the guy at the other end of the table at Wigilia. He stood on my front porch looking like he’d rehearsed something in the car and forgotten all of it. He handed me one of the coffees. Then he reached into his jacket and handed me an envelope. It was Tinley’s college card from East- I want Casper to have half of this, he said.

I’ll go to the bank Monday and move it. I just need his information. I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. That’s not what this is about, I said finally. It’s not the money, Corey. I know it’s not, he said. I know. I just didn’t know what else to do. He looked down at his daughter in the car seat. I didn’t ask to be first, he said.

I don’t want her to be first. Not like that. He told me that after the christening in the parking lot of the supper club, he’d said something to my father. He’d said, Andre, Casper was here first. You know that. And my father had looked at him for a long- moment and said, you wouldn’t understand, son. You were born to your mother. Corey said it was the strangest thing anybody had ever said to him.

He’d thought about it for two weeks and he still didn’t know what it meant. Neither did I. Not yet. I gave him back the envelope. I told him to keep it for Tinley and I meant it and I shook his hand. It was the first time I’d ever thought of him as my brother. In those two weeks, I found myself thinking about things I’d never thought twice about, like the photo albums at Babsia’s old house before she sold it.

There were albums going back to my grandparents’ wedding in 1956, but the first picture of my father in any of them. He’s already sitting up by himself on a blanket in a little sailor suit, six months old, maybe more. Kaz, his younger brother, had a picture from the day he came home from the hospital. My father didn’t have one, like the way my father never visited my grandfather’s grave.

My grandfather died in 2004. Every Memorial Day, Babsia and Uncle Kaz would drive out to the cemetery with flowers. My father would drive Babsia there and then sit in the car. Like the one time when I was a teenager that Uncle Kaz said something at Thanksgiving about his real family, meaning his in-laws, and my father set down his fork and said, don’t use that word at this table, and walked outside. None of it meant anything by itself.

That’s the thing about clues. They don’t look like clues until you know what they’re for. On Sunday, April 19th, at five in the morning, my phone rang on the nightstand. It was the nursing home. Babsha had passed in her sleep a little after four. The night nurse said she’d been peaceful. She said Babsha had asked for a glass of water around midnight and said thank you and gone back to sleep.

I called my father. It was the first time we’d spoken since he hung up on me. He answered and I told him, and there was a long silence. And then he said, Okay, Tomek, thank you for calling. His voice sounded about 90 years old. The nursing home needed her room cleared by the end of the week. That’s how it works. There’s a waiting list, and grief doesn’t move anybody up it.

My father said he couldn’t face it. So on Tuesday, April 21st, Uncle Kaz and I drove over with a stack of empty boxes. Kaz is my father’s younger brother. He’s 61, a retired high school shop teacher, a big, quiet man with hands like baseball mitts. He and my father were never close. Exactly. They were polite. I’d always figured it was just two brothers who didn’t have much in common.

We packed up her clothes for the church rummage sale, her rosaries, her pictures of the Pope, her little television. Then we got to the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. It was the one she’d had since her wedding. It smelled like the inside of a closet in 1956. There were quilts in it and baby shoes and a bundle of letters my grandfather had written her when he was stationed in Germany.

And at the very bottom, in a brown envelope soft from being handled, a folded document. I opened it standing by the window. It was from the County Court of Brown County. Wisconsin. It was an order of adoption, dated September 18, 1962. It said, in old typewriter letters, that a baby boy, born April 3, 1962, was from that day forward the legal child of my grandparents, and would hereafter be known as Andre Richter.

My father’s birthday is April 3, 1962. I read it twice. Then I turned around and held it out to Kaz. He didn’t take it. He didn’t need to. He sat down on the edge of his mother’s stripped bed and put his big hands on his knees. I wondered if that was still in there. He said, you knew. I’ve known since I was 13, Kaz said.

And then he told me. My grandparents were married in 1956. For six years, they tried to have a baby and couldn’t. In 1962, they went through the Catholic Charities in Milwaukee, where the sisters ran a home for babies waiting to be placed. That September, Babsia and my grandfather drove down there and came home with a five-month-old boy and named him Andre, after my grandfather’s father. Three years later, in 1965, Babsia got pregnant after all.

That was Kaz. From the day Kaz was born, Kaz said, our father had a son. and he had Andre. My grandfather was never cruel to my dad in a way anybody outside the house could see. He never hit him. He just counted him differently. Kaz got taken deer hunting at 12. My father never went.

When my grandfather bought a fishing boat, he told everybody it was for him and his boy, singular. When Kaz went to college, my grandfather paid for it. My father paid his own way through the technical college, working nights at the mill. When my father was 16, Kaz said, they had a fight at the supper table about something stupid, the car maybe, and my grandfather stood up and said it in front of all of them.

You don’t talk back to me. You’re not even a real Richter. You’re a Catholic Charities Richter. I was 13, Kaz said. Your dad didn’t say a word. He just got up and went out to the garage and stayed there till midnight. And he never talked back to our father again. Not once, until the day he died. He looked at the decree in my hand. Mom fought for him, Kaz said.

Every day of her life, she’d tell him, you were ours the minute we held you. But my father’s voice was louder. It always is, that kind of voice. I sat down on the bed next to him. Blood is blood. Picked one out of a file. Don’t use that word at this. table. My father wasn’t saying his own words to my son.

He was saying my grandfather’s. He’d heard them so long in that house that they’d gotten into him. And now he was saying them to a three-year-old boy from the county who’d come home with a garbage bag and a stuffed dog. The only other adopted child in our whole family. He was doing to Casper exactly what had been done to him.

I have to show him this, I said. Today, Cas shook his head. No, he said. Not today, and not you. He told me that in March, a few days after the christening, Christina had visited Babshia and told her about- the church steps, laughing, like it was a funny story. The next morning, Babsia had asked Kaz to drive her to the church.

She’d had a good day. She’d sat in Father Hoffman’s office for almost an hour with the door closed. When she came out, she’d handed Father a sealed envelope and told him it was for her funeral. She told me she’d take care of it herself, Kaz said. Let the funeral be hers, Tomasz. She’s been waiting 64 years to say something.

Let her say it. I wanted to argue. I wanted to drive straight to my father’s house with that piece of paper, but it wasn’t my secret. It was his, and it was hers, and sh**. She was the one who had earned the right to tell it. So I put the decree back in its envelope and I put it in my coat pocket and I waited.

The funeral was Friday, April 24th at 10 in the morning at the same church. My father sat in the front pew in his good suit with Christina on one side of him. Corey and his wife and Tinley were next to them. Kaz and his wife were across the aisle. I sat in the third row with Michaela. Casper was on my lap in a little clip on tie, holding the stuffed dog with the chewed ear.

He’d asked to bring it. He said Babsia would like to meet it. Father Hoffman gave the homily. He talked about Babsia. Babsia’s rosaries and her pierogi and her 62 years at the parish. People laughed a little, the way you do at a funeral when something’s true. Then he took an envelope from between the pages of his homily notes.

A few weeks ago, he said, Babsia came to see me in my office. She asked me to read one thing out loud at her funeral, in her own words. She was very particular that I read it exactly as written, so I will. He unfolded the paper. He put his reading glasses on. In 1962, God gave us our first son, Andre, through the sisters in Milwaukee, he read.

He was chosen, and he was out. the minute we held him and I want his grandchildren to know it father folded the paper back up he didn’t say anything else about it he went right on with the mass but nobody in that church heard another word I was watching my father I saw his shoulders go stiff I saw Christina turn and stare at him I saw Corey lean forward to look down the pew and then my father turned around he turned all the way around in the front pew the way you’re never supposed to do at a funeral mass and he looked back over the rows of people he wasn’t looking for me his eyes went right past me he was looking for Casper he found him

in the third row on my lap holding stuffed dog with one ear the only other adopted child in that church my father looked at my son for a long long time then he turned back around and put his face in his hands after the final prayers while everybody was standing and the pallbearers were getting ready my father stepped out of the front pew he didn’t go toward the casket he walked back up the aisle one row two rows three and stopped at the end of hours he bent down his knees cracked he’s 64.

casper he said his voice broke on the name would you come sit with grandpa casper looked at me i nodded and my son cl He climbed down off my lap and held his arms up the way he did in our kitchen that first morning and said, up. My father picked him up. He held him close, not at arm’s length. Casper put the stuffed dog on my father’s shoulder and patted it.

And my father carried my son to the front pew and sat down with him on his lap and cried into his little clip-on tie for the rest of the mass. We talked afterward, my father and I, out on the church steps, the same steps. It was warmer that day. The snow was finally gone. I took the decree out of my coat and handed it to him.

He looked at it for a long time. She kept it, he said. I didn’t know she kept it. He told me the rest himself. How he’d found out at 16, at the supper table. How he’d spent the next 48 years trying to prove he was a real Richter. A real son. A real anything. How the day I told him we were going to foster, he’d heard his father’s voice in his own head before he’d even thought about it.

You don’t know what you’re getting. He said it had come out of his mouth like it had been waiting there. When he looked at Casper, he said, he saw himself in that sailor suit on that blanket, with no hospital picture. And instead of feeling love, he felt fear. Like if he let himself love that boy, Somebody could stand up at a supper table someday and take it away.

I thought if I didn’t count him, my father said, then nobody could uncount him. Isn’t that stupid? I did it to him before anybody else could. He wasn’t making excuses. He said that too. He said, that’s not an excuse, Tomek. It’s just the truth. Your grandmother tried to tell me my whole life, and I didn’t hear her until she was in a box.

In May, an envelope came to our house in the mail, in my father’s careful block capitals. Inside was a card with a lamb on the front and a statement for a college savings account with $1,000 in it. The name on the account was Casper. At the bottom, my father had written, For my first grandchild. The next time we went over to his house, Casper ran straight to the refrigerator.

The cut photograph was gone. In its place, under the same fish magnet, was the full picture from the baptism. My father at the font in his good suit, holding a baby in a white gown. Holding him close, Casper pointed at it and said, That’s me. My father said, That’s you, buddy. That’s always been you.

THE END