Page 111 of Beautiful Place By the Sea

I try again. “But you knew this, didn’t you?”

It seems like my dad is going to leave me hanging again, but at last, he responds. “I knew.”

My voice starts to shake then, because somehow, hearing the truth from my father is making the whole thing hit all over again. “What about Grandma?”

“What about her?” Dad asks quietly.

“Why did she marry him?”

“Ivy.”

I try for a different approach. This is too important; I can’t let him shut down. “Is it because of whatever she wrote about in her diary?”

“I think you know that it is,” he answers, defeated.

“Dad, what happened? It couldn’t possibly have been that bad.”

He laughs then, a ragged, bitter sound that I didn’t know he had the capacity for. “It wasn’t. That’s the thing, it really wasn’t. But it broke me completely, and that’s why I’ve kept it from you. That’s what drove your mother away. I couldn’t bear to let it take you from me, too.”

A muffled sob echoes through the phone. Jesus. Now he’s crying? And what does any of this have to do with Mom?

“Look,” I hesitate. “I really didn’t mean to⁠—”

“No, no. You’re right. You should know.” There’s a long pause while he collects his thoughts, then he begins slowly, as if deliberating with every word whether this ice is safe to tiptoe across. “I didn’t know about any of it until your grandfather died. My parents were wonderfully warm and welcoming, but they were very private people.”

“Truer words have never been spoken,” I joke, attempting to divert the negative energy from this conversation.

Dad doesn’t acknowledge my play for levity. “When Grandpa Charlie passed, your grandmother needed my help getting his affairs in order.”

“Right,” I say. I remember my dad going to his parents’ house every night after work for months to help Eleanor through the loss of her husband, and to deal with some of his accounts so she could focus on healing.

“Right. So one of the projects she needed me to handle was getting a certain bank account that was in just his name switched over to hers, with Greg and me as the beneficiaries. She wanted things to be all set for when something happened to her.” He sniffles a bit. “It was a mess, Ivy. The bank was disorganized; they kept losing our paperwork, and every time I thought they finally had everything they needed, I’d get a call saying something else was missing.”

“I think I vaguely recall you mentioning this.” He mostly complained to my mom, but I’d heard loud mentions of “the damn bank” in tandem with various other profanities during the months immediately following Charlie’s death whenever I visited my parents.

“One of the things they needed, which wasn’t conveyed to me until about two months in, was my father’s social security number. Something about reporting interest earned on his account to the IRS.”

“Okay,” I say, not understanding how any of this pencil-pushing relates to some earth-shattering secret.

“I didn’t have the number handy, and Mom was too distraught to remember it. So I went digging through her file cabinet, trying to find his social security card. It was a lot less organized than I would have expected, given how particular my parents were.”

I think back to the perfectly wrapped Christmas gifts Eleanor always gave us, the immaculately mowed lawn Charlie was so proud of. “That is a surprise.”

“I know. As it turns out, my disorganization came from somewhere. Greg’s, too.” He chuckles. “Yep. Greg and I are definitely their kids.”

I’m still not understanding where this is heading, but then my dad speaks again. “Her kids, that is.” He pauses as if for emphasis, but I’ve definitely missed the punch line.

“What are you talking about?”

Dad sighs. “When I was looking for the social security card, I found something else. My birth certificate.”

“Okay?”

“Charlie wasn’t my father.”

The words are dense, suspended in the air for a moment as if to threaten their weight. Then all at once, they fall all around me, and I succumb to an avalanche of understanding.

“The man in Grandma’s diary—she got pregnant?”