Just Around the Corner

“You say that now.”

“I know it,” Phyllis assured the girl. “I’m not going down that road again.”

“That’s what my mom always says.”

“Always?”

“Yeah, each time she gets divorced.”

“How many times have there been?”

“Five, counting the one she’s going through now.”

That could certainly cause low self-esteem and emotional insecurity in an adolescent girl.

“What about your father? Do you ever see him?”

“Nah. He left when I was about two. I think he remarried, but my mom never really said for sure.”

“You ever consider looking him up?”

Sophie shrugged. “What’s the point? He knows where I am if he wants to see me. It’s been eighteen years, so I’m guessing he doesn’t.”

Phyllis’s heart went out to the young woman. “You don’t know that,” she said. “It’s possible he thinks you don’t want to see him. That he’s trying not to interfere in your life.”

Sophie looked away. “I wrote to him between husband number three and four,” she said with youthful bitterness. “I was just starting high school. He never wrote back.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SITTING THERE in her office, facing the chair that had been occupied by numerous st

udents over the past year and a half, Phyllis felt a personal pain she’d never felt with a student before. She wondered if it was because this girl was Matt’s star pupil, and Phyllis and Matt’s lives were so confusingly tangled at the moment. Or, more likely, she thought, Sophie was just something special all by herself, which was why she’d become Matt’s star pupil.

“Maybe your father didn’t get the letter.”

“He got it,” Sophie said dryly. “And even if he didn’t, surely he got at least one of the four other letters I sent him before I figured out he really didn’t care.”

The bastard. That was the type of man who had no business fathering a child. Not someone like Matt Sheffield, who was so aware of the far-reaching responsibilities of fatherhood that he was sparing all future children from suffering because of him.

“Could you have had the wrong address? Maybe he moved.”

“He paid child support sporadically—whenever my mom was in between husbands and went after him for it. I got his address off one of the checks she left lying around.”

Warming to the girl, to the problem that wasn’t completely unlike her own experience, Phyllis searched for a way to connect—to help Sophie.

“You know, after my husband left, beating me up emotionally on his way out, I had a really hard time realizing that his rejection had nothing to do with me. That the problem was him—not me.”

Sophie looked away, her gaze somewhere around the window behind Phyllis’s desk.

“He wasn’t home enough to really know me there in the end,” Phyllis went on, “but of course, he knew me better than your father knows you. I mean, how can a man who hasn’t seen you since you were two even know what he’s rejecting?”

Sophie’s eyes were bright as she looked back at Phyllis, but although Phyllis waited, Sophie didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, after Brad left, I wasn’t very smart. I went through a period where I just hated myself. I wasn’t woman enough to keep a man. Wasn’t pretty enough, sexy enough,” Phyllis said, telling this special girl something she’d only told her very closest friends. And then, only recently.

“What’d you do?” Sophie asked quietly, her chin lowered as she watched Phyllis from beneath her lids.

“I punished myself, my body, by eating everything in sight. I was undesirable. I deserved to be fat, to have men look right through me when I walked down the street.”