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Hank took off his sunglasses and looked me in the eye. “Tell me about the pictures you saw that have piqued your curiosity.”
“The prom pictures. My mother in a dress and you in a tux with a matching cummerbund. A bunch of other photos of the two of you looking cozy together, one from eight months before I was born.”
He slumped and moved to sit on the wicker couch so we no longer faced each other. “What did your aunt tell you?”
“Not much. She said it was your story to tell.”
Hank massaged his temple. “It’s your mother’s and my story.” He filled both glasses and took a long sip.
The silence weighed down on me, crushing my chest and squeezing all the air from my lungs. “How long did you date?”
He returned his glass to the table with a thud. “We met in junior high. At the eighth-grade Halloween dance. She went as the Bionic Woman. I was the Six Million Dollar Man. They were popular shows at the time.” He smiled at the memory, and I could almost see the little boy he had been, stocky, with his dark curls falling into his eyes. “We were pretty much inseparable after that.”
“Until you left Stapleton.”
“Until I left for New York.” He reached for his glass again. “I needed to focus on hockey and only hockey, so I didn’t want her to come.”
“And she got back at you by sleeping with my dad?”
The vein in Hank’s forehead pulsated. “He wasted no time moving in, always had a thing for her.”
“Did you love her?” I had never suspected Hank had feelings toward my mother, but the pained expression on his face told me I’d missed something.
He picked at the wicker on his chair. “We were kids. What did we know about love? I thought wearing the number eighty-eight on my sleeve was love.”
His words confused me. Their meaning snapped into place as I watched a cart race down the mountain. “August eighth, my mother’s birthday.”
“I never quite mastered the romantic gesture.”
I thought his choosing my mother’s birthday as his hockey number was sweet, but I didn’t offer my opinion.
“A mutual friend told me she married Dom. Neither of them bothered to tell me themselves.”
He stood to bring me my iced tea. The glass felt cold and wet in my hand. Condensation dripped onto my leg.
Back at the couch, Hank adjusted the tilt of the umbrella. I had the feeling he was weighing his next words.
Leave now, before it’s too late,a voice in my head commanded. I pictured myself running down the deck stairs and around the house to the driveway, cruising down the mountain, my life exactly as it had been when I woke up this morning.
Hank’s voice, like a sledgehammer, broke through my thoughts. “She never told me she was pregnant.”
Get up and run.
“Things were different back then. No cell phones. No internet; no Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat where people posted pictures and status updates.” He leaned forward so his elbows rested on his knees. “I didn’t piece together what happened until I came back here years later.”
A mosquito landed on my knee. I shooed it away before it could bite me, but my leg still felt itchy; my entire body itched.
“You were ten by then, almost eleven, and I knew the moment I saw you.”
Here it comes,I thought.The moment my life blows apart.I put the glass down on the table next to me and tightened my grip on the chair’s chains.
“Your dimples, your curly hair, your dark eyes.”
All three were the things that made me stand out from my family. “Knew what?” I hadn’t meant to ask, but the words slipped out.
“Knew you were mine.”
A buzzing sound echoed through my head, making it hard to think. “No.”
