Unexpected Arrivals(51)
I didn’t dare make eye contact when I gestured with my outstretched hand, offering her the explanation for my tears.
“Oh.” That was the only thing she said. She didn’t yell or blow her top. It was one word, one syllable—that was all Dottie gave me.
Until she sat on the bathroom floor and leaned against the cabinets that held me up. She patted my knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Children are blessings regardless of the circumstances under which they enter the world.”
I rolled my eyes up to her, wondering what kind of drugs she’d done while she was out of the house. “You can’t be serious. My life is a total mess. How could I possibly bring a child into this chaos?”
She pulled tissue off the roll of toilet paper and handed it to me to blow my snotty nose. When I finally cleaned up my face, she said, “What about the father? Won’t he want to help?”
I proceeded to tell Dottie all about Carp without giving his name or Cora’s. They had both grown up in this town, and I couldn’t risk it getting back to them—not before I figured out what I planned to do. There was so much more to consider than just being a single parent, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it all at this point in my life.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Chelsea. And I wouldn’t force you to do it even if you told me the boy’s name. However, I think any man who fathers a child has a right to know. You weren’t the only one who conceived that baby, and you certainly shouldn’t be the only one responsible for raising it.”
I never knew my dad—not even his name. I’d never seen a picture, heard my mom talk about him, nothing. Not a Christmas card, a birthday present, or even a “hello” along the way. But I never missed him because I’d never known anything different. I’d had an amazing childhood, and other than my mom, Dottie was the only family I’d had.
“I think it would do more harm than good. Plus, I didn’t have a dad, and I turned out okay.”
“You’re incredible…but, Chelsea, your mom didn’t always have it easy. She worked really hard when you were little, and she struggled at times. Just because you never saw that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. And she knew throughout your entire childhood that she would get sick at some point, leaving you alone. She took a huge risk by not involving the father.”
“Then why’d she do it?” Despite my asking this question more times than I could count, my mother had never given me anything to go on.
Dottie’s head dipped and her eyes closed. I could tell she was on the verge of revealing a piece of truth that had the potential to change how I’d viewed everything in my life. I held my breath, waiting for her to speak.
“All of this happened before I met her, so I can only tell you what little I know.”
My chest rose and fell dramatically, and my heart raced.
“She dated a man at work, but he traveled a lot. They had a casual relationship as far as my understanding goes. Your mother cared for him, even if she didn’t love him. They saw each other frequently and talked regularly. When she told him she was pregnant, he finally admitted to her that he was married.”
I gasped, unable to believe anyone could carry on an affair, even a casual one, and the wife not be aware it was happening.
“You have to remember this was a different time, Chelsea. Social media didn’t exist, cell phones were relatively new and not widely used. She had no reason to believe he was anything different than what he told her he was.”
I was speechless. I’d never imagined my mother in some sort of sordid affair. That was the opposite of the person I grew up with. Although, it also made Dottie’s story believable. My mother wouldn’t have slept with another woman’s husband had she known she existed.
“So what happened? Did his wife find out?”
“I think he realized what he stood to lose by his wife finding out, and I believe he loved his wife, he just got caught up in something he shouldn’t have. So he offered your mother a lot of money to go away, which your mother refused. To the best of my understanding, he never told his wife, and your mother never spoke to him again. You were never an option for her—she loved you from the second she knew you existed. It wasn’t in her to be part of a scandal either, and she never would have destroyed a marriage that could have been salvaged. I don’t believe she ever spoke of him again. She was determined to do things on her own, and for you to have the best life possible.”
“If she knew she had Huntingtons then, why wouldn’t she take the money?”
“She wasn’t sick and hadn’t shown any symptoms at that point. And I think she wanted to keep you pure. In her eyes, accepting money for her silence meant she was ashamed. So she adamantly refused.”
It didn’t change anything for me, even if it blew me away. My mother was still my rock, and I loved her. I hated that she struggled because she’d refused help, but in the end, it made our relationship what it was.
“So the guy never asked about me? He never called her to check on me or anything?”
“Not that I’m aware of. I think it might have been the wakeup call he’d needed, although that’s just my assumption. Your mother believed his image in the community played a part, and an affair would have destroyed him and his family. It wasn’t something she wanted on her shoulders, so she let it go and never looked back.”