My mother was delighted with me, by all accounts. Not only was I large and healthy, but I looked nothing like her ex-boyfriend, my dad’s brother Freddy, which she hoped would put to rest any rumors of who my true daddy might be. To remind her nosy neighbors in El Paso, Texas, should they choose to gossip, she called me “Eddie Junior.” My first memory is of a face. A very young and pretty woman with shiny, bobbed black hair, big brown eyes, and a gently curving nose is bending over me, smiling. This is my mommy’s face, I know, and it fills me with a sense of shivery happiness and well-being….Apropos of which, thirty years later I would marry that face, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. My second memory is of a face as well. I am playing with my daddy on the grass in my maternal grandparents’ backyard. …
