Tyffanie

Tyffanie is Joy’s daughter and, after Joy’s death, the child adopted by Dominick and Dessa. Her story moves from the uncertainty surrounding her health and care to a lasting place in their household. The change is not presented as a simple resolution: it follows Joy’s fear for her daughter, Dominick’s initial inability to answer that fear, and a gradual relationship built through shared family life.

Identity and Early Circumstances

Tyffanie first appears as a baby in Joy’s care. During a visit, Joy explains that she had checked with the pediatrician before having cartilage removed and stresses that the child had not felt pain. The scene also shows Joy handing her directly to Dominick. Tyffanie makes spit bubbles and nonsense sounds; Joy laughs, imitates her, and places the baby in his arms. The gesture brings Dominick into immediate physical contact with the child, even as he has not yet accepted a lasting responsibility for her.

After Joy and Tyffanie leave, Dominick finds the baby’s pacifier on the kitchen floor. He tells himself that Joy can buy another one at a convenience store for seventy-nine cents. His quick, practical dismissal contrasts with the intimacy of having held Tyffanie moments earlier. The small object registers how readily he tries to treat the visit as temporary, before he has faced what Joy may be asking of him.

Joy’s Illness and Her Request

Joy reveals that she is HIV-positive and had learned this while pregnant. She attributes the infection to Thad, whose other relationships, she says, were not as carefully managed as he claimed; he later has full-blown AIDS. Thad has never seen Tyffanie, and Joy’s account presents him as absent from the child’s life as well as unwilling to share his limited money, which he says he needs for his own treatment.

Tyffanie’s health remains uncertain in the account. She has been tested three times—twice in California and once in New Hampshire—and has so far appeared free of the virus. Doctors think she will be fine, but further testing must continue until she reaches eighteen months before they can be sure. Joy holds on to that possibility because she fears that she may have harmed her daughter’s future. The repeated tests make Tyffanie’s safety a continuing concern rather than a settled fact.

In a letter, Joy asks Dominick to consider taking Tyffanie if his HIV test is negative and Joy becomes seriously ill. She is afraid the child might otherwise end up with strangers she considers dangerous, and she does not want her own mother to raise her. Joy frames the request as both urgent and conditional: she may never develop AIDS, but she needs to know that Tyffanie has a chance at a secure life. She also connects the plea to Dominick’s loss of his own little daughter, imagining that caring for Tyffanie might give him another chance at fatherhood. Dominick’s immediate response is physical distress: he drops the letter, goes to the bathroom, and vomits. At this point, the request overwhelms him rather than producing a promise.

A Place in Dominick and Dessa’s Family

Tyffanie’s later place in the family is supported by more than the adoption itself. Joy dies in March 1997 after a difficult illness. During the last year or so of her life, she and Dessa become friends. Joy recalls once seeing Dessa and Angie at a mall food court, sitting nearby and listening to their conversation because she wished she could be Dessa’s friend. The remembered encounter gives their later friendship a history of longing before it becomes a real connection.

Dessa and Tyffanie take to each other from the beginning, even before Dessa starts taking the girl to University of Connecticut women’s basketball games. By age six, Tyffanie knows the players and has collected most of their autographs. In the driveway, she makes her first basket at a regulation-height hoop. The successful shot is a small but vivid measure of her growing independence and of the everyday attention surrounding her: she has interests, knowledge, and a place in the household beyond being the subject of a guardianship decision.

Adoption and Significance

The adoption goes through in January, a couple of days after Dominick’s birthday. Joy has signed the paperwork two or three months before her death, when she is already very weak. Signing brings her to tears and laughter; she says that what she has always wanted is for Dominick to be the girl’s father. The paperwork thus makes formal the future Joy had asked him to consider, while also recording her participation in arranging it before she dies.

Tyffanie’s adoption does not erase the circumstances that brought her into Dominick’s life: Joy’s illness, the risk that Tyffanie might have been infected, Thad’s absence, and Dominick’s grief for his own daughter. Instead, it changes what can follow those losses. Tyffanie becomes the child Dominick raises with Dessa, and the account’s clearest signs of that future are concrete rather than grand—a shared basketball interest, a first basket, and Joy’s completed papers. The book establishes Tyffanie’s adoption and her developing family ties, while leaving her eventual HIV status unstated in these passages.