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“Reg?” she asked, confused.
“No, myrealdad. The one who made me. The one who gave me my stubborn nature and my crooked nose.”
She smiled then, just a flicker, and said, “He was an attractive man. I know that might sound weird to you coming from me, but he was hot as heck, really.”
“Ew, you’re right,” I laughed. “I don’t want to hear about that. What was he like, though?”
“He was charming. He was also really rich, which is why it hurt so much when he took off and never sent us a dime,” she said.
“How old was I when he left?” I asked.
“I don’t know, around your second birthday I guess,” she said. “Things were pretty chaotic back then, I was a different person.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“I liked going out with my friends more than I liked being a mother,” she said and her eyes dropped down. She studied the table and traced a line in the wood with the tip of her finger. “It was tough. I was young, barely older than you are now. I wanted to live my life.”
“Where were you living?”
She looked up then, her light blue eyes filled with tears. I could see where Nat the brat had gotten her beauty at that moment. It wasn’t just my mom looking at me, but I could see the girl she’d once been. The gorgeous blonde with the beautiful face and lithe, perfect body. Everything I wasn’t, but now at least I knew where I got my darker features and brown eyes. My father had been the opposite to my mother in all ways, looks, money, education, and free of the burden of caring for me.
“I was staying with him at his place,” she said. “He had an incredible penthouse apartment in New York. I felt like royalty when we lived together, like the entire world was at my feet and the future held anything possible.”
“What changed?” I asked, prompting her to keep going. She’d never opened up this much about him before, and I wanted to know more. My quest for more information was paramount at the moment.
“He thought I got pregnant to trap him,” she said and shook her head. She let out a scoff of disgust. “As if I wanted to trap him, I could have had a hundred other men just like him lined up if I hadn’t gotten pregnant. I was just starting out runway work for some of the biggest fashion houses in the world. My star was rising and I had suitors lined up around the block waiting for a date with me.”
“So I ruined your life,” I laughed. “Sorry about that, ma.”
She snapped out of her reverie at that, and said, “Oh god, no. Everly, no. Don’t even joke about that, you’re myeverything. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world.”
“I’m just confused why he took off,” I said, not entirely buying into her theatrics. I wasn’t exactly her everything, and some days I wasn’t even sure if I was her anything. “And why didn’t you try to get any support from him or his family?”
“He left one weekend and never came back,” she said. “After a couple weeks, his family sent a concierge to move us out of the penthouse and back to my parents’ place. I never heard from him again and his family refused to talk to me. It was quite awful, being cut out completely like that.”
“So for two years they treated us like family and then they cut us off?” I asked.
“No, for two years your father hid us from his parents, and then abandoned us. When they found out, they sent us away,” she said. “Listen, don’t take this personally. Those rich types aren’t exactly known for their kindness. They only managed to get that much money by treating somebody horribly along the way, and it chips away at their very souls. You can’t blame them for being exactly who they are.”
“I can blame them for a lot of things,” I said with a bitter edge to my words. “I can blame them for leaving us dirt poor. For ruining your life. And ruining mine. They deserve the blame for shielding their precious little boy and hiding the fact that he has a daughter. I can’t believe they never wanted to see us, or even sent a check to help us out.”
“The Popov family isn’t known for their charitable work, and they didn’t want their eldest son, poor Ivan, being sullied by a scandal like an illegitimate daughter with a girl from a trailer. We’re too poor for them, too low class. I’m sorry, but they’ll probably never acknowledge you. But why are you asking about him now? You’ve never shown much interest so far.”
“I don’t know, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about,” I said.
The kettle went off at that moment, saving me from having to explain myself further. She made us each a cup of mint tea and we started talking about what she’d been up to since I’d been gone.
The first cracks I’d ever seen in her marriage to Reg showed up and surprised me. She mentioned how Reg had become unhappy and unmanageable since his shooting accident, and how she was thinking of moving into the guest bedroom for the time being. She was actually happy he was gone, when she admitted it to herself.
“But I’m worried about Nat,” she told me. “What will she think if I turn my back on her father? I don’t even really want to look for him to be honest. I’m happy he left us.”
“She’ll think you’re a woman who’s not willing to put up with shit,” I said. “And I think that’s completely okay.”
It was strange, my relationship with my mother. She wasn’t that supportive of me, and she’d borderline neglected me my entire life. She favorited Nat, and put her marriage before me. I still wasn’t even sure if she knew what Reg had been doing to me and I still wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to know.
And yet, despite all this, I felt a certain kind of softness towards her. I wanted to protect her from herself, maybe, and from the world. From men like my father, and definitely from Reg. For some reason, my mother elicited an almost maternal response from me, and I felt more like the adult between us. I always had.
“But I don’t want to have a series of failed relationships,” my mom replied to me. “How am I supposed to talk to Nat one day about this? Her father disappears and I don’t bother looking for him? I don’t even bother fighting for him?”
