An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach #1)(24)
Natalie turned on the TV as she scrolled through her emails and half watched the last half hour of a crime show. She responded to emails from several students. As a teacher of freshman English at a community college, she tried to be accessible. Having gone through those in a timely manner, she exited her email and opened the genealogy website where, several months ago, she’d submitted her saliva for a DNA test. She hadn’t had high expectations from the results, though she did discover several second cousins she hadn’t known about, one who lived near State College, a Nittany Lion like Natalie, whose enrollment at Penn State had overlapped Nat’s for two years. They’d spoken on the phone several times and were making plans to get together sometime later in the fall at a Penn State football game. Nat’s main genealogical goal was to find her father’s maternal great-grandparents, whose names and places of birth had somehow been lost over the years.
Her bare feet crossed at the ankles and rested on the edge of the coffee table, she scanned the DNA matches, searching for names that might have been added since her last visit to her page, but there was nothing new. She opened the family tree she’d started for Daisy, thinking the day might come when she might want to know about both sides of her family. Jonathan had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with their daughter, which was fine with Natalie. The last year they’d been together he’d grown increasingly distant. Nothing had changed in their lives that she could see, though in retrospect she’d realized there’d been much he’d taken pains to hide from her. She’d discovered he’d been using and selling drugs the day she found out she was pregnant, and she had delivered her ultimatum: stop using, stop selling if he wanted to stay with her. But as soon as he’d heard the word baby, he was packing. After he left, she had no regrets. From that moment on, she’d known she’d be raising her baby alone. It had never occurred to her to beg Jon to be part of Daisy’s life. She didn’t need the child support—she could support herself and Daisy with no help from him, thank you very much—and her father had left her and Grace each a generous inheritance, so financially she was fine.
Until Natalie had finally broken down and told her mother about Jon’s drug problems, Maggie’d insisted that she locate Jon and let him know he had a daughter. The last thing she wanted was to have that negative, criminal influence in her daughter’s life. It well may have been that Daisy would have questions later and she’d do her best to answer them as honestly as she could. If Daisy chose to seek out her father and/or his family when she became an adult, Natalie wouldn’t stand in her way.
Once she’d realized what he was using and how often, his strange disappearances had begun to make more sense. But since Daisy’s birth, she’d had recurring nightmares about Jon taking her daughter with him when he drove to Kensington, that section of Philadelphia where heavy drug use was most rampant and lethal, and losing the baby somewhere in the maze of abandoned houses that made up the warren of shooting galleries. Of him putting Daisy down in the midst of a trash-strewn room and forgetting about her. Of someone stealing her and taking her God knew where.
Natalie had definitely inherited a wild imagination from someone.
She skimmed the list of mostly third, fourth, and fifth cousins, and finding nothing new returned to her research to locate James Flynn, her fraternal great-great-grandfather. Two hours had passed, and while she’d identified four possibilities, she couldn’t differentiate between them, James Flynn apparently being a relatively common name in Ireland in the eighteen hundreds. Tired of staring at her computer screen, she decided to give up the search for the night and pick it up again at some point over the weekend. Maybe if Daisy napped on Saturday.
Natalie’s phone buzzed, alerting her to an incoming call. She glanced at the screen, then smiled.
“Hello, Mom,” she said.
“Hey, pet. How’re my girls tonight?”
“Your one and only granddarling is sleeping like the angel she sometimes is. She had a full day at nursery school, so she’s beat. She was out like a light by eight.”
“She’s a growing girl. How ’bout you? How was your week?”
“Busy. We have midterms in two weeks, and I have a stack of papers to read. But I didn’t make any big plans for the weekend. I just want to take it easy and hang out with my baby girl tomorrow.”
“But you’ll be here on Sunday for dinner, right?”
“Of course. Dinner at Mom’s on Sunday is a great American tradition. We’ll be over around three, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. Whatever time works.” Maggie paused. “Have you spoken with Grace recently?”
“Not spoken, but we did text a little tonight. She said she was going out for drinks with some friends, but she’d see us at your house on Sunday.”
“Oh, good. I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. I wonder who she went out with.”
“I had the feeling it might have been some new friends, but as long as she’s out of that house and socializing and hopefully having a good time, I don’t care who she’s with.” Natalie sighed. “I almost wish she’d go get another job. I mean, I realize why she doesn’t—the firm was Dad’s baby. But for her to have to face that shithead Zach every day—well, it has to be killing her. You know how much she loved him. I think she still does.”