Roger Gibson was not a good man. He wasn't a good husband, and he certainly wasn't a good father. He'd never wanted to get married in the first place, only marrying Linda after she'd gotten pregnant with Jon. At that point, after a few well placed threats from her father, he'd reluctantly wed her, though given time she really wished he hadn't. It started with the fact that marriage in no way stopped him from cheating on her, and only got worse when you considered his almost miraculous ability to blow through their family's finances with his gambling addiction. In a lot of ways, it had been a net good for the family when he left them shortly after the birth of Mikey, even if it did cause a lot of angst for Jon and Zoe when it happened.
Roger had always been handsome and moderately charming, it was part of what had gotten Linda to be with him in the first place. However, as he aged and continued his hard drinking lifestyle, his looks were starting to fray at the edges. His brunette hair was beginning to thin, a bit of a belly was beginning to form; he was keeping it in check for now but it was creeping up on him bit by bit. He worked as an insurance salesman, and was moderately successful, but too much of a slacker to ever really advance.
Those were the facts of Roger's history, but those facts were already shifting like wet clay under the force of the Gibson's quickly changing roles. Now, it was Linda who had left him; the far more confident, and financially successful model having had enough of his bullshit and kicking him out of her and the children's lives. Zoe was now the older sibling instead of the younger; instead of becoming a goth, she'd become an exceptionally protective and caring big sister to Juniper, taking on some of the burden of parenting from Linda.
However, despite all of that, he still technically qualified as family when Jon made his wish, even if he hadn't been thinking of his father, mostly because Roger no longer lived in Lakeview. Roger had moved down the coast to Los Angeles, but had been called back to Lakeview that particular day to deal with clearing out an old storage box he forgot he'd rented. He was waiting for the front desk person at the storage facility to return with his key when the door opened behind him and someone said, "hello."
