The champagne glass in my father’s hand caught the New England afternoon light as he raised it high, the bubbles catching on the rim like they were hanging on his every word. His eyes glistened with tears of joy while he made a toast to my sister Madison’s unborn baby. The problem wasn’t his emotion or even the beautiful speech about finally becoming a grandfather.
The problem was the seven-month-old baby girl in my arms—his actual first grandchild, Isabella—whom he’d never even met. I’m Olivia Ortiz, thirty-two years old, standing in my sister’s perfectly manicured backyard in suburban Connecticut, the kind of place with stone fire pits, a heated pool, and Adirondack chairs purchased at full price instead of on sale. I’m watching my father give the grandfather speech I had dreamed of hearing seven months ago.
This is the same father who taught me to ride a bike on cracked Brooklyn sidewalks before we moved upstate, who called me his little princess until Madison was born when I was five and I somehow became invisible. My husband Carlos stood beside me, his jaw clenched so tight I worried he’d crack a tooth. He’d watched this favoritism play out for the eight years we’d been together—from family barbecues in Queens to Christmases in Dad’s colonial-style house outside Hartford.
But today was different. Today, our daughter was being erased in real time. Madison, resplendent in her designer maternity dress that cost more than our monthly mortgage, kept shooting me these little sideways smirks between her fake tears of joy.
She knew exactly what she was doing. The pattern wasn’t new. When we were kids, Madison got the car for her sixteenth birthday—a brand-new silver Honda Civic with a big red bow in the driveway—while I got a heartfelt card about learning the value of working and the keys to Dad’s old pickup “whenever he didn’t need it.” She got her college fully paid for at a private school in Boston while I took out student loans to attend a state university, loans that I’m still paying off with every automatic withdrawal.
Her wedding at a waterfront venue on Long Island Sound looked like something from a luxury magazine, with Dad spending forty thousand dollars on flowers, a live band, and a champagne tower that reached my shoulders. Carlos and I had a backyard ceremony behind our small rented duplex in New Haven with a potluck dinner that Dad called “charmingly modest”—which was his way of saying, “I’m not helping, but I like how cheap this is.”
But this was different. This wasn’t about money or things.
This was about my daughter’s existence. Dad was really warming up to his speech now, talking about how he’d waited so long for this moment. How he’d been collecting toys and books for his future grandchild.
How Madison had made his dreams come true. The crowd of about fifty relatives and friends was eating it up, dabbing at their eyes under strings of fairy lights and rented white canopies, the soft hum of I-95 in the distance. Madison’s husband, Derek, filmed everything for their social media.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
