The Accidentals(13)

My subconscious has made him cute, in a harmless kind of way. With sandy hair and blue eyes. I could probably find a social media account with pictures of him. But I don’t think I will. It’s more fun not knowing.

Haze closes the book he’s supposedly reading and stands up. It’s five thirty—time to meet Frederick for dinner.

We walk out of the building, and I’m feeling nervous again.

“You know,” Haze says. “You could blow him off today. If you just didn’t show up, what could he really say? ‘Hey, Rachel! You stood me up! Oh, I’m sorry, Dad. If I do it a thousand days in a row, we’ll be even.’”

Six thousand days, I correct. Or sixty-five hundred. “I don’t think I can make you understand.”

“You’re right, you can’t.”

“He’s here now, and he wants to help.” It sounds better than the truth, which was a more complicated heap of burning curiosity and a decade and a half of waiting to be seen.

“Rachel, I help you.”

“That is the truth,” I admit. “And we will hang out on Saturday, after your shift at the garage.”

He walks with me until Frederick comes into view, waiting by the car again. Then Haze stalks away, staring.

“A friend of yours?” Frederick asks when I make my way over to him.

“Yes. Since forever.”

“He looks disgruntled.”

I slide into the car, smiling at the understatement. “You’re right. He’s not…gruntled.”

In the front seat, Carlos laughs.

“Isn’t that weird?” I hear myself begin to ramble. “Some negative words sound like they’re the opposite of a positive one, but they’re not.”

Frederick scratches his chin. “You mean like…nonplussed?”

“Exactly. Not every negative has a positive.”

He grunts. “Sure they do. It’s just not the positive that you’re expecting.” He takes his beat-up little notebook out of his pocket, flips it open and begins to scrawl on the page. “But that is a fun idea. I love idiosyncrasies.”

“What do you do with those notes?” As I say this, I realized it’s the first question I’ve asked him about himself. The question I really want to ask is, How did you get my mother pregnant?

But I’m afraid he won’t like me asking. And I’m afraid I won’t like the answer.

“A whole lot of nothing, usually,” he says, scribbling in the little book. “But once in a while, I get a song out of it.”

And then his phone rings, and I listen to another one-sided call with Henry. “Isn’t that what we pay Publicist Becky for, to think up this crap?” my father asks him. “You two just pick something, and I don’t care what it is. A stomach bug. A drug problem. Tell them I was abducted by aliens. I’m hanging up now.”

He ends the call, but his fists are clenched in his lap all the way to the restaurant.





Thai food tonight. I sit at another outdoor restaurant table, trying not to fidget. Frederick is across from me, and I still wonder if he’s a mirage. This is my third time in his presence. This could go two ways—someday it might seem normal to walk into a room and see Frederick there. Or, more probably, he’ll disappear again.

Ten years from now when someone asks me about my father, I might say, “I met him three times when I was seventeen. We had pad thai at a table facing a golf course, and I didn’t have the courage to ask him how I was conceived.”

Frederick has come prepared with a more neutral topic of conversation. “What classes do you want to take at Claiborne Prep?”

“Well…” I haven’t thought about that in weeks. “The English classes looked cool. There’s one for Russian literature. I guess I’ll keep taking Spanish for the language requirement.” And music. But I’m not ready to share that.

Which is funny, because I always imagined that when I met my father, we would talk of nothing but music. In my fantasy, he would be touched to discover we had so much in common. And he’d be devastated that he’d wasted so much time.

But now? Music is the last thing I wanted to share about myself. If I tell him I arranged one of his favorites—the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—for my junior choir project, in four-part harmony with counterpoint, he’ll know exactly how deeply my hero worship runs.

How utterly humiliating.

“I wasn’t the student you are,” my father is saying. “I almost flunked out my first year of college.”

“Did you?” But I know this already, having read it in an interview in Spin.

“The required classes almost killed me. But I was able to hang on long enough until they’d let me take all music courses. I scraped by.”

I know so much about him already—that he likes old movies and fresh-squeezed orange juice. I’d read that he’d once played for an Obama campaign rally, and that he’s allergic to cilantro. I know that his stage name—Freddy Ricks—came about because his friend Ernie thought it sounded “less constipated” than Frederick Richards.

“I wish I’d known there was no need to be so impatient,” he says. “I wish I had it to do over again. That and a whole lot of other things.”