Good Riddance(25)

“Okay. I’m sorry I chased you away.” I managed to plant a kiss on a fast-moving cheek as he left.

Now what? There went my evening. I picked up his glass, flopped onto the sofa, took a sip.

Without a knock, the door reopened in less time than it would have taken him to reach the elevator. “What did that sonovabitch tell you?” he demanded.

Well, there it was: full vilification. But before I had to confess the gigantic life-changing thing that Peter Armstrong couldn’t withhold, my father had taken back his Scotch and was pacing. “You won’t believe it—it’s such a cliché. It’s Peyton Place—you know that novel was based on a real town in New Hampshire?”

“Dad—”

“You want to know how I found out about your mother and that man, the moment I knew for sure that my wife had cheated on me?”

I very much did want to know but arranged my face into a look meant to convey If you must.

“They rendezvoused at a motel!”

“No!”

“And she paid by credit card! Why? Did she want me to find out? Or because he didn’t want a record of it due to his exalted position as an associate in a Nashua law firm? It didn’t take a detective to figure out what the charge on our Mastercard bill meant.”

What to say in the face of a tirade so uncharacteristic that it rendered me mute? I finally came up with a weak “Are you sure?”

“Of course! And the next time she was out late, ‘out with the girls’—how stupid did she think I was?—I was waiting up, Mastercard bill in hand.”

“Because it showed—”

“A room charge!”

“And?”

“She told me it was a hen party for somebody’s thirtieth or fortieth—who the hell knows?—birthday, anniversary, whatever.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t true—”

“Who throws a birthday party at a motel?”

I asked when this was—which month and year.

“I don’t remember! It’s not the kind of thing a husband commits to memory.”

“But at some point she admitted everything?”

“And promised it would never happen again, that it was over. That he had a serious girlfriend. That they’d met only to talk, to break up. All lies.”

“But you and Mom obviously worked through it. You must’ve.”

He shook his head.

“No? You were together for the rest of her life.”

“Eventually. But”—and here his voice sounded as bitter as I’d ever heard it—“how humiliating do you think it was? One of my graduates, the most likely to succeed, was bedding the principal’s wife! I knew damn well it wasn’t a one-time rendezvous. Essentially, I threw her out.” He paused, then added softly, “Like a trailer-trash husband except I stopped short of throwing her clothes out the window.”

Now I began rewriting my family history for the second time in one week. “You asked her to leave, but she didn’t, obviously.”

“Yes, she did, that same day, and moved in with her parents.”

“For how long?”

“Until she begged to come back. She rang the doorbell one night. It was late. I was weak—”

“You loved her.”

“I let her in. She cried. She apologized. Profusely.”

“So she stayed.”

“She had to. In those days she’d have lost her job.”

“Wait. Because she was having an affair? Had it gone public?”

“No. Not that. But if she’d been a woman, separated . . .”

It took a few seconds. I said, “She was pregnant.”

“She was pregnant,” my father said, and reached for me.





13


There’s Proof and There’s Proof



One might expect that my father and I would spend a few more hours—or at least minutes—discussing reopened wounds and mortal sins. We didn’t.

“I’m talked out,” he told me, hand back on the doorknob. “I never thought . . .”

“Never thought what?”

“That all of this would see the light of day.”

I had my hand flat against the door, blocking his departure. “One more question, and I’ll never ask again: Isn’t it possible that you and Mom together—”

“Conceived you? No.”

“You know for a fact because you had some scientific proof?”

“I did some wishful thinking that by some trick of the calendar you were mine. But I knew as soon as you were born.”

I waited, asked him to sit, to stay, to tell me how he knew from the get-go that I couldn’t be his.

The next two words were pronounced so softly I had to ask him to repeat them.

“Blood type.”

“Mine?”

“Yours. Your mother and I were both type O.”

“So? Doesn’t that make you the universal donor?”

“But not the universal parent. We two couldn’t produce a child with AB blood.”

And that was me: type AB.

“That was proof for you, but not for”—I now had a title for him—“the donor?”