![]() ![]() When money was tight, Richard took on weekend work selling door-to-door. Richard doted on his only daughter, and encouraged his sons to keep a close eye on any boy who dared to date Joyce. To Joyce, her parents’ life together had-up until that day in 1983 when her mother visited her-seemed as conventional as any other couple’s in their working-class neighborhood. “You could not sit there and tell me that Dad is not my dad,” she recalls today, from the kitchen table in the same Bronx home where she grew up and where she now lives, once again, with her mother, who’s 89. She mentioned the man’s name, but it meant nothing to Joyce. Joyce’s biological father, Veray explained, was someone else. Richard knew why his wife had made this trip. “Your father is not your father,” Veray told her. When Joyce first saw her mother and the look on her face, she worried something had happened to her father. In fact, on the day that her mother came to visit, Joyce was living with one of her aunts and working at a department store. Washington was both new and familiar to Joyce she’d been born there, and two of her mother’s sisters still lived there. ![]() After high school, she moved to Washington, D.C., for college, working at IHOP to help pay her tuition. At home, when their parents were at work-Veray as a schoolteacher, Richard as a youth counselor-Joyce would also cook for the boys. It helped that she was taller than her brothers. She volunteered for pickup football games and played center on her high school basketball team. As the only daughter in the Darby household, Joyce had held her own. ![]()
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