I'm still getting the brakes fixed and when that's done I'm coming to see you, probably in a couple of weeks. As I keep fixing this and that the car will finally become reliable from bumper to bumper and I can visit any time and often. I'll call before I come down and, remember I'm Robert Conrad "Martin Luther King" Manuel. The one who loves you...

Shannon Luders-Manuel's charismatic Black father always told her he was about to die. By the time he was right, he and Shannon had been estranged for years. Robert and Dorrie, Shannon's white mother, fell in love over social justice work in San Francisco in the 1970s; Shannon was born two years later amid the backdrop of the multicultural Haight-Ashbury. But their family unit crumbled under Robert's binge drinking and domestic violence, and Dorrie left with three-year-old Shannon on her hip, returning to her White, middle-class roots. Shannon grew up yearning to understand not just her father-whose promises were rarely kept, whose life was transitory, and whose love she desperately needed-but also how the two worlds in which she lived, one White and one Black, could be so different. And how could she find her place among them? Shannon sought refuge from her nontraditional family in a nearly all-White Christian congregation, taking mission trips around the world to save souls. At twenty-four, newly married, Shannon began to question her need for religion when she learned her father had entered hospice. She and Robert breathed the same air for longer than they had in over two decades, and the notion of heaven seemed a lot less important than finding common ground while she still could. The One Who Loves You is Shannon's elegant tribute to the elusive father who helped shape her identity-even in absence.