took a few more steps in line. “Sometimes, he’d hold you and call you ‘little bird’ in Spanish. I don’t remember the exact word anymore, but if I heard it, I’d know it.” “Lucky for you, I have a Spanish dictionary with a silly Zorro cat on the cover,” Paloma quipped. “Surely el gato will know the answer.” She opened the book and looked up the translation of “bird.” Looking up the right word made Paloma feel like a detective searching for clues. But that was nothing new. She often hunted clues about her own life. Clues that proved, once upon a time, she had a dad. A dad who was originally from Mexico. A dad whose name was Juan Carlos. A dad who studied architecture. A dad who her mom fell in love with at first sight when she met him at the university. A dad who stopped to help some- one on the highway and never came home again. Those were the cold, hard facts. Paloma had been only three years old when he died, and she depended on her mom to fill in the memory blanks. Luckily, her mom had plenty of memories to share: Halloween parties, college days, birth- days, Christmas . . . Every time her mom shared a memory, Paloma wrote it down on a note card and added it to her “memory box,” a gift from her mom. It was just a regular craft box made of thick cardboard, no bigger than a pencil case. Paloma painted it purple and decorated it with butter- flies. Along with the note cards, she filled it with photographs of her father and other small, sentimental trinkets. Separately, each item was a clue that told her something about her father.
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