“Me too.”
“Chips? Salsa? Appetizers?”
“No, thank you.” I accepted both of the menus and flattened them on the table.
By the time she walked away, my father had composed himself.
“I’m not proud of what I did, but I tried to stay in contact with you.”
“How?”
“I sent a gift every year on your birthday. All the way until the police called, saying you were missing.”
Years of gifts, and I had none. My anger at my mother burned hot.
“Why did the police call you?”
“Your mother thought I’d kidnapped you.”
She did?“I ran away.”
He fingered the corner of a menu. “That’s what I was told. You went to a shelter.”
“They took me in. I had no one to help me.” I lifted my chin, a challenge.
“They told me not to come,” he said.
“Would you have?”
He hesitated.
“I thought not,” I said.
“That’s not fair, Ava?—”
I cut him off. “You know what’s not fair? Having to fend for yourself after you’ve been forced to live alone with a crazy woman. When I ran away, I didn’t even know how to use a telephone!”
He looked beyond me, running his fingers through his hair. I recognized the gesture. I did it, too. This fueled my anger.
“I’d like to know why I have no relationship with any family. No grandparents. No aunts or uncles. Don’t I have anyone?”
He cleared his throat. “Your mother had two brothers. They’re probably still around somewhere. She ran away from home when she was seventeen. I met her about a year later. My parents died when I was thirty, before you were born. I am an only child.”
He was tense, like he was trying to evade the hard stuff. I could read his expression as well as my own.
“Your mother moved in with me rather fast. Neither of us had any money, and it was economical to share a place while I got my engineering degree. She told me about life with her family, and it wasn’t pretty. There was a lot of abuse. She’d been desperate to get away.”
He held my gaze for a moment, slate blue and intense. The world tilted as it seemed I was staring into a mirror, his eyes were such a match for mine.
“I’m not surprised that she was on her own with you after I left. I didn’t want to abandon her. But she made me leave.”
“I don’t believe that. There was this one movie we watched.The Sound of Music.And many times when the man sang to Maria, she would escape to the bathroom. I didn’t understand it when I lived with her, but now I know. That was all about you.”
His nervous hands stilled. “She never indicated that to me.”
“What ended things?”
“You were in kindergarten when I moved out. It was arough year for you. You had your first seizure when you were four. It wasn’t clear right away that your memory was impacted. You forgot things, but you were small. It wasn’t until you were in school and we had specific things that we knew you’d learned that we realized the seizures were stealing your memory. You still knew letters and shapes, but lost all the stories you’d been told. Books we read to you were forgotten. But you were little. It was pretty muddy.”
