“We’re going to talk about all of this, okay? I promise.” And I heard a sound like a muffled sob, like she’d turned away from the phone. “But not right now. Are you okay?”
I tried to sound okay even as my voice shook. “I’m fine.”
“Because I will come get you—”
“Mom, it’s okay. I’ve got school in the morning.” Aunt Dulce was the only one of Mom’s sisters who lived in Arizona, but her apartment was two hours away, and her guest room consisted of a sofa bed in the middle of the living room. But the real reason I turned down Mom’s offer was I didn’t think I could handle watching her cry. It was bad enough listening to her try to hide it from me over the phone.
“No, you’re right, and it’s late. I’m going to stay here tonight, but I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I love you,” she said. “Always.”
I still don’t know how I said it back, but I did, and eventually, I stopped crying. I got up off the floor and washed my face and, like a robot, cleaned up the dining room and kitchen. When I came back inside after throwing away the birthday cake no one would ever touch, I made it to the top of the stairs, saw the open and empty bedrooms on either side and sank right back to the floor again. I was still sitting there on the top step hours later when Dad came home.
I jerked to my feet at the top of the stairs, watching him lock the front door, then turn, his movements slow to the point of being painful.
I had never seen him cry before, not once.
He’d caught a fastball to the face at a practice a few years ago, and it had hit him with enough force to leave stitch imprints on his forehead for a week, not to mention the close-to-baseball-sized lump that had formed right between his eyebrows. Mom had cried buckets just looking at him, but Dad’s eyes hadn’t even watered.
Then there’d been the late-night phone call right after Selena’s high school graduation telling us that she’d been in a car accident. Turned out she’d been only banged up a little, but Dad could have been driving to get a haircut instead of to the hospital for all the emotion he’d shown.
Dad was the one who’d had to drive Slammer to the vet when the doctor told us he’d become more cancer than dog and it was time to put him down. Slammer couldn’t even stand then, so Dad had scooped up the once-hulking-but-by-then-skeletal ridgeback and carried him to the car. There hadn’t been a single tear even when Slammer, the dog Dad had gotten as a puppy before he’d even met Mom, had tried to lick his cheek.
So seeing his tearstained face when he looked up at me was so horrifying that I couldn’t breathe. He stepped forward and rested his hand on the banister, but that was it. Actually ascending the stairs seemed beyond him.
“Mom is—”
“Staying at Aunt Dulce’s,” I said, unable to blink away from his face even as my eyes welled up. “She called.”
Dad’s head lifted and his hand slid higher on the banister, tightening as it did. “She called? When?”
I told him, then I inhaled in a half gasp, half sob. “I think I know, but, Dad…” My eyes squeezed shut. He couldn’t have faked the devastating shock that had brought him to his knees earlier. But I wanted to hear it. “Please tell me you didn’t know about him.”
“I would never have left my child,” Dad said, ascending the first step. Emotion flickered across his face, pinching his brows and forcing him to swallow. “Does he know? Did she tell him?”
My chin quivered. “He didn’t until I found him. She died right after he was born.”
Dad’s eyes fell shut. “I’m sorry to hear that, but his mother was not—It was never—”
“No, stop.” My back bumped against the wall and my eyes squeezed shut. Either way, his answer would be unbearable. Either he regretted losing Brandon’s mother, or he’d betrayed Mom for something he didn’t even care about. Dad’s foot stopped on the second step.
When my eyes reopened, Dad was too close, only a couple steps below me. His eyes were red, and he looked like someone who’d just witnessed a horrible accident but hadn’t processed it yet. Looking at him and seeing tears in his eyes for the first time, I felt like I’d been in that accident and was bleeding out before him.
“I was going to tell you about Brandon, but not like this. I didn’t want Mom and Sel to leave. Dad, I didn’t.”
Dad blinked rapidly at the sound of his son’s name. “Brandon,” he repeated. “And he’s here, in Arizona. All this time, he’s been here.”
I started to tell him about his son, I did, but how could I tell him what little I’d learned when it wouldn’t come close to making up for all that he’d missed? The words wouldn’t come, but the tears did, mine and his.
CHAPTER 42
Mom continued to stay at her sister’s, and Dad was…I didn’t know. I couldn’t talk to him, though every time I entered or left the house, I knew he wanted to ask questions about Brandon that I wasn’t ready to answer. Our conversations consisted of the same sentences repeated each day when I got home and he was no longer in coach mode:
“School okay?” he’d ask.
“Fine,” I’d say. “Did you talk to Mom?”
