Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My mother did most of the talking with Candido. Though she had been born to Mexican parents, she spoke—and would learn—­nothing beyond fast-food Spanish. It's not my language, Maria told Candido. Her mother, June, was, in fact, a Plains Indian from Oklahoma, making Maria half Indian.

"And your father, Emilio," Candido asked, "is Filipino?"

"He's my papa," she said. "But he's not my real father."

"What was he?" Candido asked.

"He doesn't count," my mother said, "like most men."

Born in Yahualica, Mexico, to a family of five brothers and three sisters, Candido spoke just a handful of English words. He had left school in the fourth grade to work picking onions in Ensenada. When he came to Los Angeles, his first job was at a car wash working for a black man who called him amigo because he never learned his name. Then he went to work at a Love's Bar-B-Que, where, as someone without a car, he was popular both with the waitresses eager to give him lifts home and the gay cruisers driving on the boulevard. He took English classes at night and, eventually, so he could have weekends free for partying and the clubs, left the restaurant to work at a furniture factory.

When Maria got pregnant a few months later with what she told Candido was her first child, he became her husband and a temporary legal resident. They posed for a grim picture outside the city courthouse, a fresh marriage license in my father's hand. He wrote to June, "We dedicate this photo to you with all affection from your daughter and son so that you can keep it as a souvenir." Young, pretty, and stone faced, they both embrace like two precarious towers forced together by a high wind.

Watching American Indian Sacheen Littlefeather (who, like my mother, was born with a stereotypical Mexican name, Marie Cruz) refuse Marlon Brando's Oscar to protest Hollywood's depiction of American Indians convinced Maria that, if their baby was a boy, Brando would be a great name to honor her own nonexistent Indian heritage.

"If you don't like that," my mother said, "how about Pacino?"

(Pacino Ulloa? Pacino Skyhorse? As it was, my first name was misspelled Brandon on my birth certificate, and, in a weird precursor to a life filled with shifting identities, a change-of-name form was filed when I was three months old.)

Their marriage was a Napoleon complex, short and furious. Candido worked six days a week and took English classes at night. That was his life. Maria was angry that her life as Candido's wife was so fucking boring and always ended a fight by kicking him out of June's house, where they lived.

"I don't want a deadbeat around my son!" she screamed when Candido came home late from work.

"Why haven't you learned English already?" she said when ­Candido came home late from school.

He didn't know the English or Spanish words to calm down Maria. One time they took the bus to Disneyland, parking their car in a lot downtown. They had a wonderful time, but when they returned, the car battery was dead. Maria cursed out Candido, took the bus home, and told my grandmother to change the locks.

He was kicked out, moved back in, kicked out again—over and over during the next three years. Once, when they were separated, she told Candido she'd been raped by a black man.

"Did you go to the police?" he asked.

"Why would I go to the pigs?" she shouted "Don't you fucking care about what happens to me? What kind of husband are you? I'm seeing a real man now."

"Who is he?"

"His name is Paul Skyhorse," she said. "He's an Indian. He's in jail," she said proudly.

"How do you see a man that is in jail?"

"Have you always been this dumb?" my mother asked.

• • •

I don't remember the day my father left. I was three years old. What I'd be told, long after I found out that Candido was my father, came in slivers, the last of which I'd collect when I was in my midthirties.

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.