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“Mom?” she asks after pulling the straw away from her lips. I’m tempted to brush away the saltine cracker crumbs littered across the blanket, but I’m sure she’s going to keep munching on them as her appetite returns.
“Do you want some more?” I go to reach for her glass only to realize it’s still halfway full. Also that she’s looking at me with the same face from when she first asked me if what the boys at school were saying was true about where babies come from.
Before I can prepare myself for the sharp turn this moment is about to take, she comes right out with it.
“Is Mr. Cory my dad?”
So she remembers. I was hoping that her first experience with alcohol would bring with it a blissful erasure of memory, but life isn’t working with me lately.
I reach out for her hand. “Yeah, he is.”
She nods at this, digesting it before she comes back with her response.
“What happened?”
This is such a wide question, I’m not even sure where to start.
“Remember how I told you that I got pregnant with you right at the end of high school? Well, your dad didn’t even know I was pregnant. He had to move away before even I knew. And then he changed his name, so I couldn’t find him. He didn't do it because he was trying to hide from us,” I say to clear up any confusion my rambling might cause. “I’m sure he would have come right back if he knew about you, but he didn’t. And when I didn’t hear from him for a few years, I kind of gave up hoping he would show up again.”
I told myself that when this moment came, and I finally had to explain the reality of her parental situation, that I would be the stoic parent that my child needs to lean on in a time of extreme emotional distress. The only problem is that this isn’t happening the way I thought it would.
When I said that I gave up hope of Cory ever showing up again, I wasn’t lying. But now that Cory’s back in both our lives, my heart is all over the place. Which means my former promise not to cry is out the window. Just like so many other plans I had before Cory showed up at that high school reunion.
My daughter is leveling that look that young kids give adults sometimes. Like when we pretend to understand their new lingo, but really we’re just embarrassing ourselves with already outdated slang that we're still, somehow, not cool enough to use.
“That’s not what I meant,” she says. “I meant what happened between you two? You said you were just friends in high school. But apparently not.”
No amount of experience can prepare for talking to a ten-year-old, and I live with one. I was expecting Lizzie to be more childish about this, but she’s somehow filling the role of my overly mature friend, hinting at the fact that I ended up sleeping with a guy that was supposed to be no more than a friend.
Needless to say, I slide into this U-turn in the conversation with all the precision of a garbage truck.
“It’s complicated.”
“Mom,” Lizzie says in a preadolescent voice that begs to be seen on a level playing field. “I know about sex and hormones and all that.”
“I’m not saying you don’t,” I say. “And I’ve told you before that you can ask me anything about that stuff that you want, and I’ll always give you real answers. But this isn’t that. I honestly don’t know how to describe what happened between Cory and me.”
“You told me once that he was like a brother to you.” She wrinkles her nose and sticks out her tongue. “Isn’t it weird to do that with your brother?”
“Yes,” I interject quickly. “Definitely a yes on that one. But he was a friend. A guy friend. And the night we, well,” I say, looking for the right words. “The night we made you—”
“Ew!”
“It was a hard night for me. You’ll see when you get older. Being a girl is tough. Not everyone’s going to love you.” Here I steal something Sarah said to me. “You can be the juiciest peach in the world, but there are still going to be people who hate peaches.”
She’s scrunching her nose up. “I do not need to hear my mom call her you-know-what a peach.”
Now it’s my turn to say, “Ew!” Then I hit her with a pillow, lightly, though, because she’s still a patient. “That’s not what I was saying. What I mean is that there are going to be moments when it seems the whole world rejects you. And Cory was there for me at one of those times. And well, things just sort of happened.”
I’m waiting for Lizzie’s next smart quip, but she’s biting her lips, looking too serious all of a sudden. Like I said, talking to a ten-year-old can be a rollercoaster of a ride.
“Is my dad one of those people?”
“One of what people?”
“One of those people that don’t like me? Does he not like peaches?”
When Lizzie was a little younger, she used to have this animated movie, Wreck-It Ralph, on repeat on out TV. It’s actually not a bad movie to watch a thousand times, but there’s always this one scene that absolutely kills me. The main character basically loses all her hope, and the way the voice actor cries always made me choke up far more than I should have over a kids movie.
