Where the Stars Still Shine(5)

“All set, hon?” The dispatcher is a woman named Ancilla, whose puffy grandma hair and bifocals are a strange contrast to her dark-green law-enforcement uniform. But it was Ancilla who sent the deputy to fetch my belongings from the Toyota. She let me sleep in her guest bedroom while she washed my dirty jeans. Fixed me waffles with real butter and maple syrup for breakfast. Took me shopping at Target, where she bought me a red peasant-style top with tiny turquoise flowers embroidered along the neckline. I can’t remember the last time I wore something that didn’t first belong to someone else. Can’t remember ever wearing something so pretty.

Her hand is a comfort on my back as she urges me forward. I want to dig in my heels the way the characters do in cartoons, leaving grooves along the hallway tile. Instead, I take the step.

“Will, um—is my mom okay?”

“She’s holding up real fine,” she assures me. “And Judge Daniels is a fair man. He’ll make sure she gets the help she needs.”

The help she needs? What does that mean?

Before I can ask, we’re through the swinging door and into the lobby, and my father’s arms are wrapped around me.

“Korítsi mou.” His words are low and deep and choked, and I’m overcome with a déjà vu sensation. I don’t understand those words, but I’m sure I have heard them before. “You can’t possibly know how much I’ve missed you.”

His cheek rests on top of my head and my face is pressed into the warm, clean smell of his T-shirt, but I’m stiff inside the circle of his embrace because everything about this screams wrong wrong wrong. All these years I’ve believed my father didn’t love me, that the only reason he wanted me was so that Mom couldn’t have me. I need that to be true because if it’s not, it means she didn’t just lie to everyone else. She lied to me, too.

“I’m sorry.” He pulls away. “I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. I mean, you don’t even—” He reaches out as if he’s going to stroke my cheek, and when I flinch the sadness in his eyes fills the whole room. His hands slide into his pockets. “You don’t even know me.” He looks up at the ceiling and exhales, and when he looks at me again, his eyes are shiny. “But I’m really, really happy to see you.”

I have no idea what to say, so I pull my lower lip between my teeth and let the saliva burn.

“May I—?” He reaches for my suitcase and guitar, but I tighten my grip on both and shake my head.

“You take care now, honey.” Ancilla comes to my rescue one more time, handing me a business card with her name printed on it. “If you need anything at all, you give me a holler, okay?” I nod and she pats my back. “Have a safe trip home.”

Home.

The word makes my eyes sting, but I don’t want to wipe tears on my new red shirt and I don’t have a tissue. I’m blinking to keep them at bay when my father pulls a crumpled Kleenex from his jeans pocket.

“It’s clean,” he says, and I let him take my guitar for a moment so I can blot my eyes. “Well, mostly. I, um—I’ve been kind of a mess ever since I got the call. I came as fast as I could.”

A hurricane of anger swirls inside me, and I have to fight to keep from hurling my suitcase across the room and screaming until my throat is raw. How could she do this? How could she take me away from someone who talks to me with a voice thick with tears and offers me a ratty tissue when I’m crying? How could she? How could she?

A hate so intense I think it could burn me alive flares in my chest, followed by a wave of sorrow that snuffs the hate. Mom has been my entire world for twelve years. I love her.

“So I don’t know what, if anything, your mom has told you about me,” he says, opening the trunk of a silver rental car parked outside the sheriff’s office. I put in my guitar and suitcase. “My name is Greg. You can call me that if it makes you more comfortable.” I’m relieved I don’t have to call him Dad. “I, um—I’m remarried, and my wife, Phoebe, and I have two little boys, Tucker and Joe.”

He flips open his wallet to show me a family portrait. Phoebe is girl-next-door pretty with hair the color of a wheat field. The older of the boys shares her coloring, while the other is a miniature version of Greg. He resembles me, too, which is just … weird. Their family is perfect and happy, and I wonder if there is room in the picture for a seventeen-year-old girl. Do I want to be in that picture? Do I have a choice?

“The boys aren’t really old enough to understand what’s going on,” Greg says. “But they’re excited to have a big sister.”

Even though they’re right there, captured in the moment with perpetual smiles and matching shirts, I can’t wrap my mind around the concept. I have brothers. Greg closes the trunk and smiles at me. He looks so much younger than my mom, even though they must be close in age. His face is unlined and he doesn’t have a single strand of gray hair. “Ready?”

I’m not, but I do what I always do when it’s time to leave: I get in the car and fasten my seat belt.

He starts the engine, and the little digital letter in the corner of the rearview mirror says we’re heading east. Somehow, though, I don’t think Greg has our future mapped out in his head the way Mom did. Mainly because as he drives, he’s working his lower lip, too.