“Jim lost his wife to cancer a few months ago,” Mom explains.
“I’m sorry,” Lexi and I both say.
“Your mother has been wonderful,” Jim says. “I’m not sure how I would have coped if not for her. Gina and I had been married for fifty years and we had no children. It was just the two of us.”
“How did you meet?” Lexi asks.
Jim chuckles. “In the unlikeliest of places. The Greenwood cemetery. I’d gone to lay flowers on my wife’s grave and your mother had gone to do the same on your late father’s grave.”
My heart races to near explosion. I turn to my mother. Her face has turned as white as a sheet. What the heck is going on here? Our father is dead? Lexi looks just as confused as I am.
“We talked and something just clicked. Your mother took me out for my very first drink.” Jim chuckles again. “In all of my seventy years, I’ve never drunk alcohol. I have to admit, I’m getting a taste for red wine.”
“And don’t forget, it’s good for your heart,” Mom says.
They banter back and forth but my mind is stuck at ‘your late father’s grave.’ Mom has never mentioned our father being dead, let alone buried in the cemetery in town. I’m stunned and for the rest of the meal, I toy with my food.
When lunch is over, Lexi and I can’t leave fast enough. We thank Mom for the food and exchange polite words with Jim before we flee. Lexi unlocks the car and when we enter, we don’t talk and just sit in the car digesting the information that our mother clearly knows more than she pretends to.
“Why would she keep such information from us?” Lexi says.
Is everyone in my life a liar? I suddenly feel weary. As if I’m carrying the whole world on my shoulders. My heart stutters as sadness comes over me for a father I never knew and who I have no chance of ever meeting.
“Why the secrecy?” Lexi asks.
“He was probably married,” I tell her.
Lexi looks at me. “Do you want to know more?”
Do I want to know that my sister and I were the results of an affair?
“I don’t think so,” I tell Lexi. “You?”
She shrugs. “I’m good either way. We’ll go with what you want. I’ve lived for more than thirty years without knowing who my father is. I’ll be all right.”
I exhale, glad that I have one less thing to deal with. Once, I’d have given anything for any information about my father. Now that there’s a chance that he was married, I don’t want to know any more.
Lexi inserts the key into the ignition and fires up the engine. “What do you think of Jim?”
“I’m worried for him,” I tell her, and we both burst out laughing.
“Me too,” she says. “Can you believe that he’s not tasted alcohol all his life and it’s Mom who introduced him to it?”
We chat about Jim and Mom as she drives me back to the office.
“It was nice seeing you when you’re not in a rush of picking and dropping Ivy,” Lexi says when we get there.
I work for several more hours until five when it’s time to go and pick Ivy up from Lexi’s and head for home. I’m relieved and disappointed at the same time that Logan is not home.
So much has happened and I feel caught in a mental fog. I change out of my work clothes and sit on the floor with Ivy. It’s relaxing to be surrounded by my daughter’s toothless giggle and her squeals when I tickle her.
Every time Logan sneaks into my thoughts, I ruthlessly shove him out. I’ve survived learning that my last boyfriend was someone else’s husband. I’ll survive this too. After feeding Ivy, I give her a bath, and soon, it’s bedtime for her and work time for me.
I sit with my laptop on the couch and sometime after eight pm, I hear Logan’s truck. I suck in a shaky breath. I picture him entering his house, going to the kitchen to make coffee, and sitting in the living room to watch some news.
When the knock comes on my front door, it startles me. I was not expecting Logan and I make my trembling legs carry me to the front door. Seeing him is a shock to my system. In my anger and pain, I’d forgotten how handsome and sexy he is.
His jaw is lined with a dark shadow of a two-day scruff and his hair is more tousled than usual. God, I’ve missed him. I remind myself that he’s the man who neglected to let me know that he has a daughter even after sharing his bed for three weeks.
“Hey,” he says, a wariness in his eyes.
“Hi.”
“May I come in?” he asks.
I swallow hard. “It’s late.”