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“We haven’t talked much about it. The last time she brought it up, she was seven, and I told her that her daddy had to go away. But that one day he would come back. She’s getting older now, and my simple explanations don’t work anymore. I’ve avoided that conversation since then, because there was the tiniest hope that you would show up to the reunion. And it looks like I was right.”
At the end of this strip mall, the lights above us humming and flickering with moths and other insects seeking out the light in the darkness, Cory and I stay like this for a few minutes. I stop talking, because I’m pretty sure what he needs now is time to process. We’ve both fallen onto a bench outside the massage shop, but after three minutes he finally stands. Reaches a hand out to me, and helps lift me up. My legs tingle and a slight wave of dizziness makes me remember all that cheap margarita I drank earlier.
“Let’s go,” he says.
“Where?”
“To Lizzie. I want to see her.”
A quick glance at my phone informs me that it’s getting close to midnight. “She’s asleep. Or at least she better be. I told the sitter to get her down by ten.”
Desperation contorts Cory’s face into someone less handsome and more tragic. “What do you expect me to do then? Should I just go back to my hotel room and wait? How the hell can I do anything now that I have a daughter? I won’t be able to sleep, eat, or even think about anything else until I can at least see her.”
I should be thankful. I’ve just told this man I haven’t seen in eleven years that he has a kid, and he isn’t running. He’s still here and demanding to see his progeny. But my mind is always looking for something worry over. I think that’s something you develop as a mother; even if everything is going perfectly, I worry all the more because it means I must have missed something.
Or that the sky is about to fall.
The world might not be ending tonight, but it’s certainly shifting on its axis. And I’m not sure what tomorrow will bring: sunshine or thunderstorms.
“I’ll take you home, but on one condition,” I finally say.
“Fine,” he says, his body language showing how antsy he is. He keeps looking over my shoulder to his car in the parking lot.
“Don’t say ‘fine’ so easily. You haven’t heard what it is.” After a deep breath, I let the words fall out of me like vomit that smells of stress and worry and loneliness. “You can see her, and if you want, I’ll just say you’re an old friend. But if you come out as her father, that’s it. You have to be around. Because she’s lived ten years without you, and having you just drop by, introduce yourself, and then disappear, might just kill her. And I would be the one picking up the pieces. Just like when you left us the first time.
“Before you say anything, I know that wasn’t your fault. I know it was because of your dad and the FBI, and you didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’m not holding you accountable for that. But now is different. You can’t just run away from us again. I’m not saying you owe me anything, but you owe that little girl. You owe her more than ten years. She deserves a lifetime with a father who actually cares for her, and if you’re not prepared to be that guy, then it's better if you just get on your plane and head back to your perfect bachelor life.”
Cory cocks his head when I finally get all this out. “You done?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go.”
“But you have to promise me that—”
Here Cory changes my mood with a swift kiss right on my lips. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to do that. It’s good to see you so feisty, Hot Stuff. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hurry up and meet my daughter. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
The way that Becca, the sixteen-year-old girl who lives across the street and who has been just the most stellar babysitter one could ask for, looks over Cory
when he walks in behind me tells me that she has a pretty good idea what’s going to happen once she heads home. If I were a prude, I’d blame the media or the Internet, but the truth is that she’s a stellar student who makes money tutoring kids one and two years older than she is when she’s not babysitting. So the chances are that she simply paid attention during the sex-ed class instead of making immature jokes at the cost of her education.
But for once, if Becca had to write an essay about what she thinks will be happening in my bedroom tonight, she’d get a failing grade. Or maybe just a C for effort because all appearances aside, I have no intention of sleeping with Cory. That’s not to say that I’m not attracted to him, but I’ve got to be in the mood, and this whole ‘bring home the illusive father of your daughter for their first meeting’ just isn’t revving my engine.
What it’s doing is making me sick to my stomach. Even as I hand Becca her cash with a nice tip, and she traipses down my driveway on the way to her house, being alone with Cory isn’t making me nervous in any erotic fashion. There’s no space for sexual tension to brew between us. Not with all the panic I’m feeling at what might be a horrible, terrible decision.
Cory raises his eyebrows and asks in a whisper, “Can I see her?”
Becca said that she fell asleep just thirty minutes ago, but Lizzie has pulled that trick any number of times. Back when I was young, the only thing you could stay up doing in your room was reading a book with a flashlight under the blanket or listening to music on your Walkman. But nowadays, the distractions are endless. And while Lizzie usually has no problem following our house rules, there are nights I’ve caught her playing this farming game on her phone well into the early morning.
So I’m praying that tonight is not one of those nights. I need her to be asleep for real, because after all the emotional ups and downs in the past couple of hours, I’m not sure I can deal with my daughter’s reunion with her father right now. It’s better to wait for the morning.
“Let me just check on her first,” I say and give Cory no time to reply. I drop my purse on the kitchen table, slide out of my heels, and pad down the hallway. After I turn on the bathroom light, I edge Lizzie’s door open. The light from the bathroom bleeds into her room and over the sleeping form of Lizzie. She’s wearing her favorite pajamas: a bunny onesie with built-in feet and a hoodie that’s bunched up under her neck. I move to make her more comfortable and sweep her sweaty hair away from her forehead.
I’ve told her again and again that the weather is getting much too hot to wear that thing to bed, but I forgot to tell Becca this rule, so it seems Lizzie slipped a fast one by me. Thankfully, Lizzie’s still deep asleep even after all of this, so I back out of the bedroom and head into the kitchen once more.
“She’s asleep, but let’s give her five minutes because I had to make her more comfortable and I’m afraid I might have woken her a little.”
This is a lie. The one blessing I received when I had a baby at just nineteen years old was that Lizzie turned out to be one of those rare kids that has no problems sleeping. She slept so much early on that I actually had tests run at the hospital.
