He said nothing, but I still defended myself.
“I’m sure that sounds harsh, but she was never a mom or a mother, Hutch.She treated me like a roommate when I was just a kid, doing this to a child she bore in her womb.Then, when I got older, it was the same, but she wanted to be girlfriends.A fourteen-year-old doesn’t need a girlfriend.Mona and Kacey have great relationships with their moms, and their grandmoms.They’re friends now.But when they need mothers, their moms are mothers.I don’t think my mom has that in her.”
I blew out the kind of frustrated breath talking about her always built in me and kept sharing.
“If she was in my life, I think she’d be a user or she’d lean on me in some way, boundaries be damned.I think she’d be the seventeen-year-old she never grew out of being, and she’d make me take the role of her mom, which was what I did when she got me back.And I can’t be certain, but I honestly think it’s why she wanted me back at all.I cooked.I cleaned.I made the grocery lists and made her get in the car to take us to the grocery store.That was before I got a license.After, I did it myself.The whole thing…it just wasn’t fun.”
“I didn’t say anything, baby,” he murmured gently, and then asked.“Do you know where she is now?”
“I did.The only compromise I made is that we always exchange birthday cards.And I send her a Christmas one, she sends me a Yule one.That’s it.But I didn’t tell her I moved.And I’m still debating, eight and a half months later, if I should.She writes bright, happy, bullshit notes in her cards, I simply sign mine.This sounds harsh as well, but she doesn’t add anything to my life.She was just a womb that bore me and then exposed me to a lot of nasty shit.She never apologized for it, never took ownership of it, never even acknowledged it, and that’s it.”
“She move around?”
“No, she’s been in the same place for a while.”
“So, you make that decision to let her know where you are, she’ll be there.If she isn’t, I’ll find her for you.”
This offer was startling.
“You will?”I asked.
His lips tipped up.“Okay, I won’t.But I have a friend who’s a PI.”
“Oh,” I mumbled.
“She know you got Frank Groove’s money?”he asked.
“I very much didn’t tell her that for so many reasons, it’s mind-boggling.”
“Number one is, she’d be all over you to give her some of it,” Hutch surmised.
“Actually, number one is me being pissed as shit she never told me that man was my birth father.”
I made the face any mention of Frank Groove deserved: utter revulsion.
Then I said, “Knowing what was happening in that house, it wouldn’t take an act of clairvoyance to know he was eventually going to get caught with a girl who was underage.By the time he did, he was in his late fifties.It’s not only illegal, it’s gross normally.That makes it skeevy-gross beyond recognition.I shouldn’t have been blindsided by that.But bottom line, I should have known from the beginning who my father was.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.“You should.”
Yeah.
I should.
“None of those other kids were your brothers or sisters?”he asked.
I shook my head.“I don’t know.Maybe Frank didn’t know or those women didn’t know.I completely lost touch with them when I was taken away.I have no idea where they are.And they all had flakey names, like I did.If they got away, they probably changed them, like I did.”
Oh yeah.
I’d told him about all my name changes too.
“Do you wanna know?”he asked, like it was an offer to find them.
I shook my head.“First, if they’ve moved on with their lives and they don’t want a reminder of how they started, I don’t want to give it to them.Second, we were little-kid close.We didn’t grow up together like brothers and sisters, going to each other’s games or celebrating each other’s birthdays.At times, we played together.Sometimes we fought like brothers and sisters do.Most of the time, I was up in my room playing by myself, or reading when I learned how, or exploring Frank’s garden.I don’t know if my life made me a solitary person, or if being around Frank and the way he lived did.But at the end of it, I’m a solitary person, and always have been.”
“Yeah,” he repeated.
“In other words, even after I was first taken away, I didn’t really miss them.I only missed my room, the home I knew.Even though my life in LA was effed up, I preferred it to the one in Tennessee.”
