Dominick adopts Tyffanie as his daughter

Dominick adopts Tyffanie as his daughter after Joy has signed the necessary papers and Dessa and Tyffanie have already begun to form a close bond. The adoption, completed shortly after Joy’s death, gives formal shape to Joy’s wish that Dominick become the father of her daughter and carries that wish forward into the family he builds with Dessa.

Background: Loss and Fatherhood

Dominick’s adoption of Tyffanie follows the death of his infant daughter, Angela. Angela died in May 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth; Dominick was the one who found her. He recalls that he had planned to spend more time with her once the school year ended, an intention made painfully impossible by her death. The loss remained part of his later life: when he saw young girls, he sometimes imagined that Angela had survived and that he and Dessa were still raising her.

Angela’s birth had also brought a moment of shared family happiness. Dominick went to tell Thomas that he was an uncle, and remembers Thomas smiling at the news. Thomas never got to meet Angela before she died. These recollections place the adoption against a history in which fatherhood has been marked by both love and bereavement, without making Tyffanie a replacement for the child Dominick lost.

Joy and Dessa’s Friendship

Joy’s death in March 1997 was difficult for Dominick and Dessa. During roughly the last year of Joy’s life, however, Joy and Dessa became friends. Joy told Dessa that she had once seen her with Angie at a shopping mall, followed them to the food court, and wished she could be Dessa’s friend. Their later friendship transformed that earlier, distant longing into a real connection between the two women.

Dessa and Tyffanie also grew close from the start, before Tyffanie began living with Dominick and Dessa. Dessa took her to University of Connecticut women’s basketball games, and by age six Tyffanie knew the players and had collected many of their autographs. A small but telling milestone came when Tyffanie made her first basket in the driveway at home. These details show a relationship already taking shape through shared interests and ordinary family life before the adoption was legally complete.

The Adoption

Joy signed the adoption paperwork two or three months before she died. By then she was very weak, and the signing brought tears and laughter. She told Dominick that she had finally got what she had always wanted: for him to be Tyffanie’s father. Her action made the adoption more than a practical arrangement after her death; it was a deliberate expression of trust in Dominick and of her hope for her daughter’s future.

The adoption went through the following January, a couple of days after Dominick’s birthday. Its timing places the legal change just beyond Joy’s death, but the process had begun while she was still alive and able to consent. The sequence matters: Joy prepared for Tyffanie’s care, Dessa had already welcomed the child, and Dominick assumed the parental role Joy had asked him to take.

Consequences and Significance

The adoption establishes Tyffanie as Dominick’s daughter and makes permanent the family bond that had formed among Dominick, Dessa, and Joy’s child. Joy’s decision also connects her final wishes with the life that continues after her death: she cannot raise Tyffanie herself, but she can authorize and affirm the father she wants for her daughter.

For Dominick, the adoption is a consequential movement into fatherhood after Angela’s brief life and death. It does not erase that earlier grief; the novel keeps the lost child present in his memories and imagined alternatives. Instead, the adoption makes room for a new parental relationship alongside that continuing loss. Joy’s trust, Dessa’s early closeness with Tyffanie, and the child’s everyday place in their home turn a signed document into a lived family commitment.