“Um, I’m sorry, you probably don’t drink your coffee that way any more. It’s a bit of an inside joke… I used to make you a lot of coffees in the morning when you were a kid, decaf of course, and I’d do them like that because obviously no three-year-old really likes coffee, you just wanted one like I was making for your mum.”
“I don’t remember you making us coffees,” I said. I sucked in a big gulp. No way was I going to make a fuss about how the damn thing was made when I hardly got to drink coffee ever. Mum was so shitty about having coffee in the house. She acted like it was literal poison.
“Loved doing it,” said Brad. “I got in a load of fucking trouble if I had any myself, so nice to be able to make it for someone at least. I was in training for the AFL draft back in those days, if you can believe it.”
“I heard.” I was trying hard not to look like I was on the edge of having a coffee orgasm, but weak as this one was I was struggling. Then I started feeling wary. Was Brad trying to build some sort of rapport with me through selected stories from a shared past I didn’t remember?
I needed to get onto addressing what we were really here for. I pushed the coffee back a little. “Mum said you hit me when I was three years old. That it was the reason she had to leave you.”
“I know she told you that,” Brad said. “She said she was going to do it. She warned me.”
“Well if—”
“It never fucking happened,” said Brad. “I never laid a finger on you in anger. Why would I do that?”
Surprise made me sassy. “I don’t know, how about you explain to me why she would lie?”
Brad grimaced. “I’m really going to do this, aren’t I. Explain to my own daughter—Fuck.” Two older ladies at a table near us were shooting us frequent hostile looks. Brad offered them a movie-star grin but I wasn’t sure they were buying, and he quickly seemed to lose interest in them to mutter more curses to himself.
I didn’t know what to say or do. I just sat as still as I could, waiting for him to get control over himself, and finally he shook his head a little and continued, his eyes looking a little less wild. “Well, you’re going to find out soon enough anyway. No keeping it from you. Your sister, Jess. She turned fourteen this year.”
I just kept staring at him. I could tell I was supposed to put this information together with some other information, but I was too wired at the moment to do it.
“Fourteen, Tamara,” said Brad. “Think about how old you are, how old you were when I last saw—”
Maths had never been my strongest subject. But I thought I was getting the point.
“Your mum found out about Jess’s mum not long after I found out we were having a kid. I had an ultrasound picture she’d sent me on my phone and… well, I guess I looked at it one too many times and she got wise to something being up. I was so fucking happy to be a dad again, I admit I got careless. I didn’t think about her feelings. I’ve always loved all of my kids, more than anyone can know…
even when things weren’t going so well with their mums.”
He’d cheated. And I felt like he was trying to tell me he’d done it because he had problems with my mum at the time.
I had a sister only a few years younger than me. We could probably have been the right age to play dolls together at least for a brief point in time. My mother had known about this all those years, and she’d never said a word. Did Ryan know too? He was so much older, he must have asked questions for longer when his dad disappeared from his life.
Was I really going to believe what this man I hadn’t seen for fifteen years was saying? That my mother had lied about him hitting me?
I didn’t know what I was feeling inside, except hurt. The only thing that was clear to me was that I’d ended up being just a piece in the game my parents had been playing with each other, and not even an important piece. They’d done what they wanted with me and then tossed me aside and gone on with their lives.
I was full of questions, but the one that came out was unexpectedly irrelevant. “How about you and her—and Jess’s mother? Are you…?”
“We’re all right,” said Brad. “She was always the ‘other woman’ and she knows her promotion was a stroke of dumb luck, so she’s a bit more primed to forgive I think. Sue was the type to fly off the handle at anything, go fully nuclear if she had to.”
I didn’t say it, but he was describing my mum all right.
Brad put his spoon in his coffee and stirred it thoughtfully, his face suggesting no actual conscious purpose to what he was doing. “I’m sorry I just dropped out of your life. That I never gave you an opportunity to get close to Jess. She’s a great girl, very determined. Very strong.” I tried not to look like I was making a sour face at that. It was hard not to think that Jess had taken my place in his life and I had been given no say in it.
“I would have stayed around,” Brad said. “But Sue wasn’t going to have it. She wanted me gone, and it was not enough for her that I’d just come around now and then and take you kids out or something. She didn’t want to see me again. So she came up with this story that I’d hit her, that I’d hit you and Ryan, and she told me if I ever tried to push for custody or even to contact you, she’d get it out there. Press charges.”
“And I’ve made you come out and meet me today,” I said.
Brad shook his head. “I was younger back then. Fucking stupid. Too nice you might even have said. It didn’t occur to me that it’d be fucking hard for her to prove an abuse with no evidence. What was she going to do, mark you up herself?”
My face must have really changed at that. “She wouldn’t,” Brad said quickly. “Not your mum. Not unless she’s really changed for the worse since I last knew her. She’s nuts in her own way, okay, but I never stopped believing she loves the both of you, and I hope you never stop believing that either. Everything she’s done, she did because she thought it was best for you.”
I was shaking my head. I just wanted to get up and walk, no, run away from this, but this was my life. I knew that I had no choice now but to face this can of worms I’d opened.
“So you just let her take us, and you never got back in contact.”