I gave her a vague nod, but my mind was elsewhere. Somehow, I was going to have to stumble through the next eighteen hours with my family, even though I was consumed with fear. Telling John—no, Jonas—that he was the father of my child?
Terrifying.
I wished I’d just blurted it out today on the dock. Then it would at least be over with. But that hadn’t happened, because I’d been blindsided. Escaping from him had seemed like a fine idea at the time.
It didn’t anymore. Until tomorrow at noon, I would have a clenched stomach and a bad case of the shakes.
For once, my brother wasn’t much help. Adam had withdrawn to the porch with a beer and a magazine. He didn’t emerge until suppertime when our father came home. The heavy sound of his feet on the porch steps was as familiar as breathing.
“How’s my princess?” he boomed as the screen door slammed shut.
Vivi came running, leaping into my dad’s arms.
I watched my gray-haired father swing my daughter around with the same surprise I always felt when the two of them were together. Because he’d never once called me “his princess.” Becoming a grandpa had softened this man.
And thank goodness. My whole life, he’d been pretty hard to take.
We’d never had an easy relationship, and on the day I’d told him I’d been raped, it became even more strained. Maybe he was just worried, or maybe he blamed me. I’ll never know. But he became even more silent and brittle than usual.
It didn’t help that we were trapped in this house together for months afterward, the cold Maine winter keeping me in sight of his grim expression for weeks at a time. And with Adam away at law school, I’d been lonely. It was the longest winter of my life.
When summer finally arrived, everything got easier. My father and I were both busy at the store, since summer was our high season.
And then John had turned up to distract me. He’d been a charming diversion with enormous consequences. I’d gone back to college right on schedule after Labor Day, thinking that my life was back on track, but six weeks into the semester, I began to feel utterly exhausted and caught a cold that wouldn’t go away. Eventually, I wandered into the student health building and asked if maybe mono was going around.
A very astute doctor asked me a whole battery of questions. The final one was, “When did you last have a menstrual period?”
That’s when I understood just how badly I’d messed up.
The first person I’d told about my pregnancy was Adam. He’d held me while we both cried on each other. Then I’d summoned the nerve to tell my father over Thanksgiving, when Adam was around to back me up.
My father had turned white, and then red. “You’re moving home immediately,” he’d said, slamming a fist onto the table.
“She’s going to finish the semester,” Adam had argued. “Obviously.”
“You’re out of control. Both of you,” he’d raged. The ranting went on for hours, until I ended up in my bedroom sobbing, while my brother handed me tissues, one after another.
As it happened, I did not move back to Maine at all. I couldn’t spend another winter with my father’s constant reminders of his disappointment.
“Honestly,” I’d told Adam, “I don’t think I can do it.”
“You’ll move in with me,” he’d offered without hesitating. “In Boston.”
I’d cried some more after that, but they’d been tears of gratitude.
Now, four years later, my father had a completely different attitude. Vivi was his favorite person in the world. And the minute he came home from the store, Vivi began to pepper him with her demands. “I didn’t get to go in the rowboat yet,” she complained to her grandfather, climbing into his lap.
He stood up, lifting her with him. “Is that so? I think it’s time to light the grill right now. Come outside with me.” He gave me and Adam barely a nod of greeting before taking his princess outside.
Luckily, Adam’s mood rallied. Setting aside his magazine, he opened a bottle of white wine, pouring three glasses. Humming to himself, he cooked up the sausages, grilling onions and peppers on the side.
At some point he noticed my long silences and began shooting worried glances in my direction. And when that failed to lighten me up, he tried another tactic—making cracks about how much he lurved sausages.
“So plump and juicy,” Adam deadpanned, rolling the food on the grill with a set of tongs. “They’re my favorite.”
Our father gave him a dark look after the third or fourth sausage joke. Then he slunk around the corner of the house to smoke a cigarette away from Vivi. After all these years, he was still dismayed by Adam’s sexual orientation. I’d never understood it. Adam was a successful lawyer who took good care of his friends and family. What more could a father want?
My contribution to dinner was a salad, which I served with forced cheer at the appointed time. But I didn’t fool anyone. During dinner, my brother’s concern radiated across the table.
Later, after the glacial movement of the mantel clock finally brought about Vivi’s bedtime, we three adults spent a polite half hour in the living room. After enduring thirty minutes of Dad’s baseball game on TV, Adam popped off the sofa. “Kira, take a walk with me? You’ll listen for the little skeeter, won’t you, Pop?”
He gave us a stoic nod. “Could you wheel Mrs. Wetzle’s groceries over to her door? She didn’t answer when I rang earlier. I parked them behind your car.”
“Sure thing,” Adam said, pulling me off the sofa.
Together, we went outside, where the last of the day’s light was just a stripe in the western sky. My father had left an old red wagon in the driveway, with three bags of groceries tucked inside. Wordlessly, Adam caught the handle and pulled it down the drive.
A minute later we approached Mrs. Wetzle’s place, and I tried not to stare at the room in the back. He wasn’t there, of course, but the ghosts from five years ago were all around me. They always swarmed when I came to Maine for a summertime visit.
Adam stopped beside the kitchen entrance, knocking twice on the old metal door.
Mrs. Wetzle appeared a minute later. “Could you carry those inside?” she asked.
Adam met my eyes, and we exchanged a moment of silent irritation that the old lady did not even say please.
While Mrs. Wetzle held the door open, I grabbed a bag filled with hamburger buns and condiments and ran it into the house, leaving it on the first available kitchen surface I could find. Then I turned tail and got the heck out, then waited for Adam a few yards away under a big pine tree.
The winter I’d been pregnant, and totally starting to show, the whispers about me grew loud in town. Even though I’d been mortified to ask, I had knocked on Mrs. Wetzle’s door one afternoon to inquire as to whether she might have a phone number for John Smith who had spent the summer there.
I didn’t tell Mrs. Wetzle why I’d wanted it, but the old lady had known. A long and terrible moment of silence had passed between us, while I’d squirmed under her dismayed gaze. “I never should have rented to a musician,” she’d said, while I’d wished that the frozen earth would open up and swallow me.
“Did you save his number?” I’d had to ask a second time.