The fish that Anderson caught is delicious. Amber makes potato salad with scallions and bell pepper, and a fresh leaf salad with a mustard vinaigrette. We eat on the deck, with the warm summer air drifting over us like a calming balm.
Jefferson cleans up, just as he promised, and his douchebag rating drops down a few notches.
As I finish the final gulp of my soda Steve leans over the table toward me. “Would you like to take a walk? I can show you the neighborhood.”
“Sure.”
“Take your phone,” Amber tells Steve in a worried tone. He smiles good-naturedly at her concern, but it seems a little extreme. He’s a grown man, after all.
“Of course.”
I pull my sneakers on by the front door, and Steve does the same. “It’s a good evening for a walk,” he says. “Not too hot.” It’s the kind of polite conversation that people who don’t know each other have to fill time. This is my dad, and he’s talking to me like a stranger.
We make our way down the drive and turn right along the street. It’s tree-lined in the way that all good neighborhoods are. The smell of grilling fills the air as another family makes the most of the summer vacation and cooks outside. “We liked it here as soon as we came to view the property. I mean, the house wasn’t anything to look at. The previous resident was elderly and hadn’t kept up with the maintenance. Amber had the ideas for what we could do to make it the home we wanted, and I knew it was going to be a lot of work. If the street hadn’t been so great, I wouldn’t have agreed to take it on.”
“Do you know your neighbors?”
“Sure. It’s the kind of place where everyone brings you a welcome fruit basket when you arrive. We ended up having the whole street over for drinks within our first week of arrival.”
“That’s so great.” I think about my old neighbors where I grew up. People came and went without making any impression, but there was one woman who had more men in and out of her trailer than anyone should have. Mom used to scowl about it, and it wasn’t until I was in my teens that I realized what she was doing. It couldn’t be more different from this place.
“So, you haven’t told me much about your childhood,” Steve says.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“Well, two decades’ worth of time.” Steve doesn’t want to let this conversation go, but he’ll have to. There’s definitely not any benefit in me sharing the reality of my upbringing with him. It’ll only make him feel worse about his decision to leave me in my mom’s hands.
“You know where I grew up.”
Steve nods. “I was in contact with your mom. I sent child support, and she sent me photos of you. That was our agreement.”
“You sent child support for me?”
“Of course.”
I think about all the times that my feet blistered from walking to school in shoes that were too small. All the times that I was bullied for having holes in my shirt and mismatching socks. That child support didn’t go toward supporting me; it went toward supporting my mom’s lifestyle. I can’t tell Steve that either, though.
“So that’s how you recognized me at Eastern,” I say.
“Yeah. The last picture she sent me was on your seventeenth birthday. You haven’t changed much since then. When I didn’t get any photos for a while, I tried to get in touch with your mom.”
“That’s when you decided to come and find me?”
Steve nods. “It was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
I smile, not knowing what to say. I don’t receive compliments easily and there is still a thread of resentment running through me that wants to shout at him that it would have been so much better if he’d just made that decision sooner, but what the hell would be the point of that? I don’t want to sour something that could be good for me by dwelling in the past.
Steve is walking slower than me, and I have to keep adjusting my stride to slow down. It’s surprising for a man who’s so involved in sport. I imagined that he’d be fit. The silence stretches between us, and I guess he’s feeling awkward.
“So, what do you like to do?” It seems such an inane question when there are so many other deeper subjects to tackle, but maybe it’s good to keep things superficial right now. We have the whole summer to get to know each other. There’s no rush.
“Read. Listen to music. Dance.”
“Do you enjoy sports?”
“Swimming, mostly. I like watching sports.”
“What’s your favorite book?”
“I don’t think I have a favorite. I’ve read so many it’s all become a big blur.”
“Have you read The Alchemist?”
I smile, remembering how I felt when I finished that book. It’s all as though all of life’s questions were answered. “Yeah. It’s so good. Simple in one way but complex in another.”
“It is,” Steve says. “The main character goes on an unbelievable journey to find what was practically in front of him the whole time.”
“But without the journey, he would never have been able to fully appreciate what he found. He wasn’t ready.”
“Exactly,” Steve says. “I know it sounds foolish, but that’s how I feel about you.”
I swallow, my throat tightening in a way that tells me that tears are threatening. I don’t like to cry, and I never cry in front of people. “No one ever called me treasure before.” I laugh, trying to make light of a conversation that I know is definitely not intended lightly by Steve.
“Well, someone definitely should have,” Steve says, “because that’s exactly what you are. I know that I’ve been absent from your life for too long. It was my own fear that kept me away, nothing to do with you at all.”
I don’t know what to say. It’s as though Steve had read all the thoughts I had about him when I was a child. All the times I convinced myself that he wasn’t around because I wasn’t a good person and that he stayed away for all the reasons that my mom didn’t seem to want to be around me either.
“I was too young,” he says. “And your mom…she was always fighting with me. I just thought that you’d both be better off without me there to disrupt your lives all the time. I imagined she’d find someone better for her, and you’d grow up surrounded by laughter instead of arguments.”
“That didn’t happen,” I say.
“I’m sorry about that. It’s not the picture she painted.”
We turn a corner, following an adjacent street, walking past houses that I imagine are filled with ideal American families—the kind of family I used to wish for on every birthday.
“And I didn’t believe you’d want to know me after so much time had passed.”
“I didn’t believe you wanted to know me,” I say.
“That was never the case,” he says firmly. “I have your picture in my wallet, and another on my bedside. You have always been a part of my life, even when we didn’t know each other.”
“I never had a photo of you,” I say.
“I sent them. Your mom must have thrown them in the trash.”
“Probably. That would be just like her.” Is it wrong to feel anger toward the dead? Is it wrong that I have an urge to go down to the cemetery and yell at her for all the things she did wrong and all the things she didn’t bother to do at all?
I hear Steve sigh, a great weighty sound that tells me just how troubled he is about the time that has been lost. “Are you happy?”
The question seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and it’s one I don’t know how to answer. I don’t really have anything to be unhappy about now. I have financial security, a place at a college I love, great friends, and hopes for the future. Since Steve turned up at Eastern, I’ve found a part of my family that I never thought I’d know, and I get to spend a whole summer making memories. The optimist part of me can’t find any reasons for the ache that I have in my heart. It’s an empty ache that has never been filled, and now I’m older, I still don’t have the answers to what will send that ache away.
“I am happy,” I say. All the rest of my truth is too complicated to explain, and I don’t want Steve to take on any more guilt than he has already. It won’t be good to weigh down this fragile bond that we’re building. Resentment doesn’t make things better. Bitterness hurts the one who feels it the most.
“I’m glad,” he says. “And if there’s anything you want to ask me or anything you want to talk to me about, you let me know.”
“Okay, thanks.”
The rest of our walk passes uneventfully. Steve tells me about his family. Most of them still live in the south, so it’s not easy to arrange a family get-together, but he says he wants me to meet everyone over a video call while we’re together; his brother Darryl and his sister Justine. I have a cousin called Darryl Junior too, but he’s only three. I’m sad to learn that my grandparents have died before I had a chance to meet them. Steve tells me that I’m just like his mother when she was young, and when we get back to the house, he pulls out an album and shows me exactly what he means. The photo has a grainy quality the way all pictures do from fifty years ago, but the resemblance between Hillary and me is uncanny. She could be my identical twin.
And it’s funny because as I take in my family and some of my roots fall into place, a small part of the emptiness around my heart seems to fill.
