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I can’t bring myself to tell him everything right away, so we dance around the subject. Neither of us is entirely comfortable talking on the phone yet.
“So this taste… test event is going well?” he asks when I catch him up on the stuff that seems, at the moment, pointless to talk about.
I’m pacing my living room, struggling with every word. “Taste Teaser, we called it and… yeah, it’s going really well. There are some reviews on Red Hall’s Facebook page, links to the articles they’ve been writing. Have you… been following along?”
“Of course I have, Janie,” Dad says
, softly chiding me for thinking he might not. “I’ve seen all sorts of stuff lately. What was that with the guy you threw out?”
My eyes roll, and I groan. “Gloria…” I mutter.
“Who?”
“Uh… yeah, there was this guy causing trouble and I threw him out, and… this woman that works for me was the one that mentioned I was… you know…” I guess there’s some things it doesn’t matter how old you are—I can’t bring myself to talk about my period with my father.
“Ouch. Did you fire her?” he asks. At least he’s on my side.
“Uh, no… she’s a friend of a friend, so…”
“I gotcha,” he says. “Listen, Janie… I’m glad you called and I want to catch up, but did you really call just to let me know what’s going on?”
“Can I not?” I ask.
He sighs. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry. You’re sure there’s nothing else wrong, though? It’s just… we haven’t spent this much time on the phone, well… ever. If you need to talk to me, you know I’ll listen, right? Whatever it is.”
I hold my breath until there are spots in my vision. That’s probably bad for the baby. It’s certainly bad for me, but if I let it go, everything will come pouring out.
I need that to happen very badly, though, so I exhale and with it comes the story.
Dad doesn’t speak the whole time. He doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t judge me, or stop me, or laugh or even sigh meaningfully into the phone. At times I’m not even sure we’re still connected, but I keep talking anyway until it’s all out.
When it is, only then does he speak. “Wow, Janie. I… I’m sorry you’ve been through a rough time. Do you know what you’re going to do?”
I’m conditioned to think that question has specific subtext when I hear it from a man, and I bristle momentarily.
“I mean about the father,” he adds quickly. Maybe he’s been part of a conversation like this before.
I sink onto the couch and pull my knees up. They don’t go as far as they used to. I can’t wrap my arms around them comfortably anymore. It’s begun, and a petty sadness grips me in a moment of vulnerability; not normally enough to put me over or even register, but on top of everything else it’s that last flake of snow before the avalanche happens.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” I say, my voice tight. “He’s… not exactly a good man. I’m not even sure I want him to be a part of the baby’s life.”
“It sounded like you had a good thing for a minute,” Dad says. “Not that I’m defending him, mind you. It was awful, what he did. Thing is… sometimes people do things they can’t take back and… we don’t always have a choice. It sounds like you don’t have the full story yet. Maybe it’s exactly what it looks like, but maybe it isn’t.”
“Is there a difference between someone who does something shitty because they want to, and someone who does it because they need to impress their evil father?” I ask.
Dad’s quiet a moment. “What I mean,” he says more cautiously, “is that what’s done is done. The baby should have a choice in the matter, when it’s old enough to make that choice. You have to think about that now, while there’s time. We can all be terrible people under the wrong circumstances. That doesn’t mean we have to continue being terrible people, just that we have to find ways to make it better. To make ourselves better people.”
We’re no longer talking about me and Jake and the baby. Or at least, not only those things.
“Believe me, Janie,” he says, “not being able to reach out and hold your own children… it hurts. Jake may need a lot of work, a lot of growing up, but he doesn’t deserve that kind of pain. Not just for being misguided and caught up in someone else’s madness, you know?”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“But listen,” he says, “whatever you decide to do, can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“I know this is scary, Janie,” he says, his voice warm and genuine. “And I wish the circumstances were better for you. Happier, and less complicated. But if I’m being honest… I’m overjoyed to hear that I’m going to be a grandfather. And I think you’ll make a wonderful mother no matter how this all plays out. I get that it’s painful right now, but is it okay if we just… be happy for a minute? No strings?”
