“Nothing,” my mom replied.
“She didn’t tell me my father called,” I said at the same time.
My dad looked at her, a weary expression on his face. “This again?” he said. “Really?”
“I forgot,” she told us both. “It was a mistake.”
I looked at him, making my doubt about this clear. He put down the bottle. “But you did get the message. Right?”
“Only because she threw it all crumpled up on my floor.”
He shrugged, as if this actually was the same thing. “What matters is that now you know.”
I exhaled, shaking my head. Thick as thieves, these two were. I had never been right enough for him to take my side on anything. “I just don’t understand why you’re so weird about this,” I said to my mom.
“Yeah, you do,” my dad said.
We were all quiet for a moment. All I could hear was the TV in Amber’s room, which worked just fine, in case you were wondering. “I took the message,” my mom said finally, “then brought it down there to leave it for you. But when I heard you coming, I trashed it, figuring I’d tell you myself. But I . . . didn’t. I’m sorry.”
The thing is, I knew this was true. She was sorry. In her real life, she was a capable and responsible mom, wife, and daughter. But when it came to my father, it was like she was eighteen all over again, and she always acted like it.
I looked down at the note. “Did he say what he wanted?”
She shook her head. “Just to call him when you get a chance.”
“Okay.” I checked my watch: 6:40. Crap. “I have to go. I’m already late.”
“Have fun,” she called after me as I headed back to my room. It was a peace offering, and a little bit too late, but I nodded and waved anyway, so she knew we were okay. They were quiet as I went down the stairs and started down the hallway to my room. Once there, though, I could hear their voices, muffled overhead, as she gave him the explanation she just couldn’t ever seem to relay to me. Whatever it was, it was short. By the time I was in the shower, the nail gun was popping again.
* * *
There’s a difference between the words father and dad. And it’s more than three letters.
Up until the age of ten, I didn’t know this. I also didn’t know much about where I’d come from, other than my mom had me when she was a senior in high school, which was why she was so much younger than the mothers of all my friends. Then, one day in fifth grade, my teacher Mr. Champion got up in front of the whiteboard and wrote, My Family Tree. And just like that, things got complicated.
I’d always loved everything about school, from checking out the maximum number of books allowed from the library to organizing my notebooks into neat, labeled sections. Even at ten, I took my assignments very seriously, which was why I was not content to put my stepdad down next to my mom on the top of my tree, even though he’d adopted me when I was three.
“It’s supposed to reflect my accurate, genetic family,” I told my mom when she suggested this. “I need details.”
I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. But to her credit, she gave them to me. Some I had heard before, others were new. The bottom line was that she didn’t get too far into the story before I realized my tree wasn’t going to look like everyone else’s.
My mom met my father when she was seventeen, just after her junior year of high school. She was working at the realty office; he, a year older and heading off to college in the fall, had come down from Connecticut to spend the summer with an aunt who lived in nearby North Reddemane. In any other world, they never would have met. But this was the summer at the beach, and the standard rules, then as now, didn’t always apply.
They couldn’t have been more different. His parents were wealthy—his father a doctor and his mother a realtor—and he attended private school, where he’d studied Latin and played lacrosse. She was the second of three daughters of a working-class family with a business that was mostly seasonal and always struggling to stay afloat. My mom was pretty, a known beauty; she’d dated only jocks and heartthrobs. He was a brain bordering on a smart aleck. They had nothing in common, but one night, she was heading to a party with her best friend, whose boyfriend brought along the mouthy Northerner he washed dishes alongside at Shrimpboats, a local fried seafood joint: my father. My mom was not looking for a boyfriend. What she got in the end was, well, me.
It wasn’t just a hookup: I’ve seen the pictures. They were In Love, inseparable the entire summer. He left in mid-August to go home and get ready for college, but not before they made firm travel plans to see each other again as soon as possible. The goodbye was tearful, followed by a couple of weeks of serious long-distance bills—all your typical summer romance stuff. Then my mom missed a period.
Suddenly it was no longer a romance, or even a relationship, but a crisis. Her parents were devastated, his were horrified, and what had been a singular relationship between two people became much more complicated. Calls were made, arrangements discussed. My mom had never gone into much detail, but I did know there were people on both sides who did not want her to keep me. In the end, though, she did.
For the first part of the pregnancy, she and my father remained in regular contact. But as the months passed and her belly grew, they started to drift apart. Maybe it would have happened anyway, even without a baby in the picture; maybe that baby should have prevented it. My mom, to her credit, never assigned full blame for this to my father. He was so young, she told me again and again, away at college with parents who so disapproved of the situation. They had all those miles between them and only a summer in common. It would have been hard enough for him to relate to her world—one now focused on buying onesies and reading books on labor and delivery—even without his friends in his other ear, nagging him to go to keg parties.