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He never known anybody who loved kids like Mo loved kids. All kids. She’d even been a grade-school teacher. It was just now occurring to him that not only would she be disappointed in him for bailing on his own child, she’d be downright furious for keeping another grandchild from her.
Shit, he remembered how wild with fury she’d been when Jenny had held Kelsey back from the club. Kelsey was the oldest of that generation—the first grandchild. That was how Mo thought of the club kids, as her own grandchildren. For a lot of the kids, she and D were theironlygrandparents, honorary or otherwise. She’d have wrapped Ajax in her arms from the moment of his birth.
Fuck. He’d never done anything tohurtMo before. He never, ever would have. Not Mo. Not ever. Except he had.
“Edgar,” she said, gently. “Talk to me.” That one hurt, a little. Not in the way she said it, but in what he was about to do.
“I have a kid,” he blurted, staring down at his plate. He slid his eyes her way and saw her blink, not understanding.
“What?”
Shoving a big bite into his mouth to buy a few seconds, Eight tried to compose his next sentences while he chewed. The swallow went down hard, and he took a too-big gulp of hot coffee and coughed as the whole mess threatened to choke him.
By the time he could speak, Mo had worked her way through some confusion; she stared at him with obvious shock.
“You’re going to have a baby?”
A big breath, then he said it. “He’s ten, Mo. Ihavea kid.”
She sagged back on her chair. “What? All this time? I don’t understand.”
Okay. He had to keep going. “About eleven years ago, I was sorta seeing a woman. Marcella, her name is. It wasn’t anything serious, just … you know.” Mo was the farthest thing from a prude, but she was a seventy-year-old woman he thought of like a mother, and he’d never spoken of anything like this with her. It felt wrong to go into too much detail where sex was concerned. “Anyway, she got pregnant. When she told me, I told her to get rid of it”—Mo stiffened visibly—“but she didn’t. I told her there was no way I could be a father. We went our separate ways, and I never told anybody.” Except Becker, but it felt smart to leave that part out.
He tried to look deeply into Mo’s eyes, and let her see deeply into his, so she’d understand. “The way I grew up, the way I am, I don’t know how to be anybody’s father, Mo. The kid’s gotta be better off without me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“So why are you telling me now?” Mo asked in a dangerously quiet voice. She was both disappointed and furious.
“’Cause I’m all turned around. Since Beck died, I’ve been feeling wrong. Inside, I mean. Like I don’t know who the hell I am anymore. It’s been drivin’ me fuckin’ crazy. A few months ago, I started thinking about the kid, for the first time in years. I thought maybe that was a sign, something I’d fucked up I could still put right. So I looked her up. I told her I wanted to see him.”
Mo began to chuckle softly, but not with humor. More like if a chuckle could be an eye-roll. “Oh, love.”
“Yeah, she was pissed. Pissed is all she feels around me.” Until last night, at least. “But then she came to me and said he wanted to meet me.”
“He? I assume he has a name.”
“Ajax. His name is Ajax Malcolm Lewis.”
“His mom’s into Greek mythology, I assume.”
“I guess. I thought she’d named him for the cleanser.”
“I hope you didn’t tell her that.”
“Um.”
A long sigh. “So you have a son, whom you’ve not cared about for the first ten years of his life. Except for child support.”
“Um.”
“Eight Ball.”
Mo would never use his given name at a moment like this, when she was upset and disappointed. She knew his history and would never make his name a weapon. But she managed to cut him to the quick with his chosen name nonetheless.
“She never asked for it. I would have paid my share, but she neverasked.”
Taking a long sip of her coffee, and then another, Mo stared at the center of the table. Eight could tell she was thinking, trying to measure her reaction, to choose the right words. Meanwhile, he looked down at his plate, at the delicious meal she’d made for him, and his stomach thundered, but his appetite was gone.
“This is what I see: you got a woman you don’t care about pregnant. When she didn’t want to make things easy for you and get an abortion, when she decided she wanted the baby, you ran the other way. She didn’t ask for support from the man who clearly wanted nothing to do with the child, so she’s been raising him all on her own for ten years, not making any claim at all on you. And then you popped up when you decided something inyourlife was missing, after ten years of not giving a fig what was missing inhislife, and she told you to sod off. Do I understand correctly?”
