He prepared himself with a deep inhale. He exhaled a story I could have never expected. ”When your mom and I met it was one of those opposites attract kind of things. She was on a trip to LA with a friend of hers. We met on a night out in Long Beach. It must have been fate because I never really left the ’hood. At the time, I was being initiated into a gang.”
“A gang?”
“Yeah, like a real, proper, guns-and-drugs gang.”
Was this the same Nora I knew? Was this guy really my dad? Already this sounded impossible. “I cannot see my mom being with a gang member.”
“Like I said, opposites attract.”
“Go on…”
“I’ll spare you too many details, but we ended up having a secret, shall we say, a secret romance. My brothas didn’t know about it, her friend didn’t know about it. We were together for only two weeks, but it’d felt like a lifetime. That probably sounds crazy. Love at first sight.”
It didn’t sound crazy. After only a few days, I’d known I loved Maeve.
“She had to go home and start a new job and she asked me to leave the gang and come back to Seattle with her. Course, I couldn’t. It just doesn’t work that way. It especially didn’t work that way back then. I was already running drugs for them and… I was young and didn’t know what would happen to me if I left. So, I put it down to a vacation summer fling kind of thing and left it. Even though I loved her.”
So far, this was exactly what I thought it would be. Some guy knocking up my mom. “Let me guess, a month later, you found out about me?”
“Pzzt. I knew you were coming before that. We talked just about every day when she left. We didn’t have a cells then and we’d talk in pay phone booths and send postcards. Man, I held a torch for her. She told me she was late about a week after she left. They didn’t have those fancy pregnancy tests back then, so we waited a few days, biting our nails, until finally she had a positive test.”
“You didn’t use protection?”
“We were drunk. A lot.”
“Not using protection doesn’t sound like the Nora I know.”
“I don’t think there’s a kid alive who knows what their mom used to get up to.”
He was probably right. “Fine, so then you found out about me and ditched on your duties?”
“Hell no! I was all over that shit! I always wanted a family. I started saving my money from selling drugs and was figuring out a way to get up to Seattle.”
“What happened?”
“I went to jail.”
I scratched at the base of my neck. Jesus. I was the son of a deadbeat and a convict. Some bloodline.
“I got out when you were almost a year old. I wanted to see you. Your mom, and rightfully so, she wasn’t so sure about it.”
“So you just didn’t try? Just left it there? I’d fight to see my kid…”
“Oh, I did. I begged your mom to bring you to visit. She wouldn’t have it. She didn’t want to put that memory in your head. She didn’t want you to be exposed to such ugliness. Can’t say I blame her. Do you?”
It had been a hard call to make.
“Well, if you do blame her, you shouldn’t. She knew. She was the wise one. Drake, you gotta understand the gang pull-and-push factors are strong. And it was the only life I knew. The only way I knew how to make money. Your mom didn’t want you messed up in that. And… she was right. I was in and out of jail for years. It wasn’t good. But it was how your grandma was first able to find me so easily. She wrote to me in jail. And that’s how we started our correspondence.”
“I still don’t get why she would want to keep you around. You knocked up her daughter, were a criminal, and didn’t want to see your son.”
“Now that’s where you’re wrong. I did want to see you. I told you that much and I want you to believe me. Though,” he hung his head, “that’s for you to decide. But no matter what, your mom was right to keep you away from me.”
He looked off in the distance, summoning the past to appear between us at this coffee shop in Venice Beach. “I didn’t get my act together. Your grandma told me that she’d read some of the postcards your mom and I exchanged. She’d known you were conceived in love. That one day you might want to know that.” He shrugged. “Does that matter to you now? That you were brought into this world because two people loved each other? I didn’t ‘knock her up.’ I loved her. Very, very much.”
Did it matter that my dad had loved my mom? The thought swirled around my veins, into and out of every limb. Did it matter? My guts said yes. For some strange reason, it made me feel validated in a way I’d never been before. “It’s nice to know.”
“Well, so maybe your grandma was right. Unfortunately, your mom was right, too. She was right to keep you away from me. Not only did she not want you around my influence and have you end up in a gang or selling drugs, she didn’t want the kids at school knowing your dad was a con. That would have been… limiting.”