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I tossed her a smile as I set about correcting my mistake. “Thanks for the tip.”
She set her pop on the counter and came over to help me rearrange the errant silverware.
“Are you excited about being an aunt?” I asked her.
“I guess.” She shrugged, straightening again when all the forks had been righted.
“I imagine this all must be pretty strange for you.”
She shrugged again and reached for her pop. “It’s fine or whatever.”
“Is this where your grandmother likes these?” I asked, cautiously slotting a pie plate in the lower rack.
“Yeah.” Maddy lingered by the fridge, silently watching me load the rest of the plates into the dishwasher. When I moved on to hand-washing the wineglasses, she got a clean dish towel out of a drawer and began drying the glasses as I rinsed them. “So you and my dad dated in high school, huh?”
“That’s right.” Technically, Donal and I had never gone on a single date, but that seemed like an unnecessary hair to split with his daughter.
“He’s never mentioned you before.” Her tone held a note of challenge that made me think she might have come to some conclusions of her own about the nature of our relationship.
I glanced at her, my expression carefully neutral. “Does he talk about his other high school girlfriends a lot?”
“No, not really.” Her brow creased in a thoughtful frown that reminded me of Donal. The similarities between them were subtle, but became more noticeable the longer I spent around her. “Not at all unless Grandma brings them up.”
I handed her another wineglass to dry. “I don’t think your father’s very nostalgic about the old days.”
“Were you two together a long time?”
This conversation felt like tiptoeing through a minefield. I preferred not to lie to Maddy, but I also wasn’t sure Donal would want me telling his daughter how casually we’d embarked on a sexual relationship as teenagers.
But then I reminded myself that she wasn’t a child—she was an eighteen-year-old woman with a boyfriend of her own and was about to go off to college in another state. Rather than learning about sex by sneaking Judy Blume books from the library, Maddy’s generation had grown up with the internet at their fingertips and were considerably more jaded and worldly-wise than I’d been at her age—not that I’d been particularly innocent at eighteen either. Clearly.
“We were friends for a long time.” I reached for a towel and dried my hands. “From elementary to high school. But we only dated for a few months.”
“He said you two were together his senior year, but I know you weren’t his prom date because grandma has his prom picture in a frame upstairs.”
Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the counter, wondering where she was going with this. “I didn’t go to prom, because it would have been too difficult to hide my pregnancy in a prom dress. But your father and I had already broken up months before that.”
“Because he found out you were pregnant?” The challenging tone was back, but it wasn’t me she was challenging. I finally understood what she wanted to know—if her dad had been a good guy or a bad guy.
“He didn’t dump me. I broke up with him.”
Her confounded expression told me my hunch was right. “Why?”
“It was complicated.” There was no way to explain my reasoning without giving Maddy more ammunition to use against Donal. So instead I told her therealtruth—the truth I’d only recently begun to admit to myself. “What it really comes down to is that I got scared and pushed him away. I think I needed to believe I was still in control of my own life, that I was strong enough to handle what was happening to me without showing any weakness. I was so afraid of letting anyone see how terrified I really was that I isolated myself from all my friends, including your father.”
“He didn’t abandon you?” Her reluctance to accept it made my heart ache for both of them.
“He wouldn’t have done that.” Despite what I’d convinced myself at the time, I’d come around to believing that Donal would indeed have stood by me if I’d let him. It was like he’d said: he might have been a dumbass, but he wasn’t a complete dickhead. He would have tried to do the right thing. I gave Maddy a pointed look, hoping she’d see the parallel with her own relationship with her father. “He wanted to be there for me, and he would have if I’d given him a chance. But I shut him out, because I was too proud to admit that I needed him.”
She lowered her gaze to the floor, shuffling her feet. “Sorry if I’m asking too many nosy questions.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind a bit.” I offered her a smile as I pushed off the counter. “Show me where your grandmother keeps the dishwasher detergent, and I’ll answer any questions you want to ask.”
Maddy got the detergent out from under the sink and helped me start the machine. “What was my dad like in high school?”
I thought about it while I went to work on Kathleen’s big roasting pan with a scrubbing brush. “He was a lot of fun.”
“Mydad?” Maddy said in disbelief.
