I

He’d watched me dismiss Kevin the college football player as soon as I’d seen
him in a furry mascot outfit. My parents knew better than to get too attached.
They’d raised me to run my own life, and that’s basically what I did. I was too
focused and too busy, I’d told my parents plenty of times, to make room for any
man.

According to Craig, my father shook his head and laughed as he watched me
and Barack walk away.

“Nice   guy,”   he  said.   “Too    bad he  won’t   last.”

f my family was a square, then Barack’s was a more elaborate piece of
geometry, one that reached across oceans. He’d spent years trying to make sense
of its lines. His mother, Ann Dunham, had been a seventeen-year-old college
student in Hawaii in 1960, when she fell for a Kenyan student named Barack
Obama. Their marriage was brief and confusing—especially given that her new
husband, it turned out, already had a wife in Nairobi. After their divorce, Ann
went on to marry a Javanese geologist named Lolo Soetoro and moved to Jakarta,
bringing along the junior Barack Obama—my Barack Obama—who was then six
years old.

As Barack described it to me, he’d been happy in Indonesia and got along
well with his new stepfather, but his mother had concerns about the quality of his
schooling. In 1971, Ann Dunham sent her son back to Oahu to attend private
school and live with her parents. She was a free spirit who would go on to spend
years moving between Hawaii and Indonesia. Aside from making one extended
trip back to Hawaii when Barack was ten, his father—a man who by all accounts
had both a powerful mind and a powerful drinking problem—remained absent
and unengaged.

And yet Barack was loved deeply. His grandparents on Oahu doted on both
him and his younger half sister Maya. His mother, though still living in Jakarta,
was warm and supportive from afar. Barack also spoke affectionately of another
half sister in Nairobi, named Auma. He’d grown up with far less stability than I
had, but he didn’t lament it. His story was his story. His family life had left him
self-reliant and curiously hardwired for optimism. The fact he’d navigated his
unusual upbringing so successfully seemed only to reinforce the idea that he was
ready to take on more.