Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

Jarrett begins this chapter with a retrospective of his art life at different ages: “When I was a kid, I’d draw to get attention from my family. In junior high, I drew to impress my friends. But now that I am in my teens, I fill sketchbooks just to deal with life. To survive” (214-16). He follows these words with a spread of moody, dramatic, emotional high-school drawings.

When Jarrett was in his early teens, his mother was out of the halfway house again, and back in Jarrett’s life more regularly. She had a new boyfriend, Miguel, who Jarrett at first mistrusted, but came to accept as he stuck around. The two of them would turn up to drive Jarrett and Pat to high school events, and they moved into another house that Joe and Shirley bought for them—though this time, they had to pay rent.

Another big change came during this time. When he had to dig up his birth certificate for a school trip, Jarrett learned his father’s last name: Hennessy. He looked up all the Hennessys in the phone book, but didn’t call.

Instead, he kept busy in the traditional teenage way, partying in the woods with his friends. On one night, a drunken stranger punched him and bloodied his nose; Joe, unimpressed, merely said, “That’s what happens when you go ‘out’” (246).

Jarrett remembers painting a portrait of his grandparents for their 45th anniversary, and Shirley cruelly rebuffing him by saying he wasn’t that good an artist, trying to dissuade him from pursuing a career she saw as unreliable.

One day, a letter arrived from his father, Richard Hennessy. The collage that ends the chapter reproduces some pages from this momentous letter.

The beginning of the book’s last chapter sees Jarrett coming to terms with his father’s reappearance. He talks to his family about the apologetic letter: The letter stuns his aunt Holly; Shirley is scornful, calling Richard a “bullshit artist” (245); Leslie says that all she ever wanted was for Jarrett to have his father in his life.

While he’s deciding what to do about the letter, Jarrett gets his driver’s license, puts together a portfolio for art school applications (his heart is set on the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design), and volunteers at a camp for kids with cancer and their families. The loving bond he forms with the kids he counsels there makes him wonder if he might have blood siblings, and it’s this question that finally drives him to write an answer to Richard. It’s an angry letter, but Richard answers it gently, telling Jarrett that he indeed has both a brother and a sister, and enclosing a photo. That his half-siblings and his father look just like him amazes Jarrett.

Now with even bigger questions on his mind, Jarrett has a falling-out with Leslie when he chooses not to send her a Mother’s Day card. When she phones angrily to ask him why he has broken with their tradition, he tells her that she’s not his mother—Shirley is. In the course of their upsetting conversation, Leslie tells him he had everything he needed as a child, and he replies, “Everything but you” (275).

At last, Jarrett decides to confront his father in person. He follows the return address on the letters, but when he gets there, he finds only a woman who doesn’t know who he is. Later that night, though, Richard calls him, and tells him he was out and the woman was his sister, who was babysitting for him. The two make plans to meet.

Meanwhile, Shirley, who’s uncomfortable with Jarrett’s interest in his absentee father, is also invading Jarrett’s privacy. When a rejection letter arrives from RISD, she opens it before Jarrett gets home. Infuriated, Jarrett drives off to meet with Richard.

Jarrett’s time with Richard starts out awkward, but his much younger half-siblings immediately and uncomplicatedly accept him. Drawing cartoons for them, he feels the potential to have a real relationship with this side of his family.

When he gets home, his grandparents are waiting for him on the front stoop. Shirley apologizes for her behavior, and says she’s just sad that Jarrett will be leaving; “I love you [...] to the moon and back,” she tells him, to which Joe replies, “Oh, for cripes sake, you two. So mushy mushy” (293). Shirley tells Joe he can “stick it where the moon don’t shine” (293).

The story ends with Jarrett’s high school graduation, and with his realization that, though his biological parents couldn’t be there for him, his grandparents were great parents to him—and you make your real family out of the people you love.