by Kris Jayne
“How was your trip?” he asked.
“Productive. We got all the details nailed down. Adrian’s parents are wonderful. I didn’t murder my mother, and she stayed sober and relatively pleasant.”
“Given your expectations, that’s a success.”
I swung my heavy bag from my shoulder, letting it hang beside me. “Yeah, so…umm, you said you needed me to notarize something.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I have the papers in my office.”
The papers he needed notarized were minor and had nothing to do with Grace. I sat across the desk and pulled out my notary book and my stamp, collected his information, and had him sign.
I shuffled the final papers and handed them back, closing my book. “Is this all you needed? I thought this was urgent.”
He flipped a pen through his fingers over and over, eyes locked on mine. His cheeks pinked, and he coughed. “No, but I figured business was the easiest way to get you over here.”
“You don’t need a ruse. We agreed to talk when we both got back to town. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and—” I figured now was as good a time as any to lay my apologies bare and hope he could forgive me, but he interrupted.
“Before we do that, I have some information for you, and I’m not sure how you’re going to take it.”
I froze. “Good news or bad news?”
“Good news, but shocking news.”
“Is this about Grace?” I asked.
“No. I mean I have news on that front. Dad moved Marisa out of the house and started her on the stipend outlined in their prenup. She’s hired a lawyer, but it doesn’t look good for her. The kids are still at his house while they work out custody. I’m going back around the board meeting and staying for a couple of weeks. I’m looking for a house there.”
“You’re moving?” My stomach sank.
“No. I’m getting a second house there. I’ll visit every couple of months—probably be there about twenty-five percent of the time.”
I ignored my own nagging doubts. It was his decision, and I had to trust him. “I’m glad you’ve worked this out.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m sorry for the things I said to you. I was working through my own issues, and I didn’t have a right to fling them at you.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I thought I’d learned to accept not knowing my father or how I came to be. I haven’t, but that’s my problem. Not yours.”
“It’s our problem, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. My news is about you.”
He pulled a manila folder from the file cabinet in his desk.
“I don’t understand.”
He drummed his hands on his desktop, then slapped them down, and spoke. “Okay, I…I’m just going to say it. I may have found your father.”
Each word left me dazed and thinking I’d misheard. “Say that again.”
“I think I may have found your father,” he said, animated by whatever he had in that folder.
I’d wanted to know my sire’s identity for so long, I felt more doubt than excitement. “How? I’ve tried for years to get something to go on, and I never got anywhere. I don’t even know where my mother was living at the time.”
“Houston. That we know for sure.”
“Who’s we?”
“The PI I hired,” Griffin said, then held up a hand and flipped open the file in front of him. “Let me back up.”
I zipped my lips, clutched my arms in front of my chest, and nodded for him to continue.
“When your mom came to get the fabric before your trip, we talked. She’s a very direct woman.”
“Do I even want to know what she said to you?”
“She said that you hated her, and that there was nothing she could do to change that, and I told her she could tell you about your dad. And in all her bluster about why she couldn’t, she dropped a few clues. It wasn’t much, but she said enough to make me wonder if a private detective couldn’t dig up more. She said that he saved her from OD’ing.”
“She’s told me that before, though,” I said, frustrated at how she could manage to tell Griffin more in ten minutes than she’d told me in over forty years.
“Did she say it was on the streets of Houston?”
“I knew she bounced around from Houston to Galveston to New Orleans around that time. My grandparents were never quite sure. I thought she’d moved backed to town from Louisiana. When she told the overdose story, she never mentioned Houston.”
She only mentioned having to go to the hospital and then rehab, and then being back on the street until she got pregnant. I never got enough helpful specifics out of her.
“She also said that he gave her her first real job,” Griffin said.
I thought back through the years. “She never told me that.”
“Well, I started wondering if it wasn’t possible to search your mother’s employment history at that time and see where she worked. If he gave her a job, he might be a boss there. And if it was a ‘real’ job, then there might be a record of it.”
“That’s true.” I tapped nervously on the edge of the desk in rhythm with my shaking knee, then pressed my hands to both knees to stop the fidgeting. “I always assumed he was a junkie she met in a drug house. That’s what she told me.”
“Did she say he was a drug addict?”
“No, that she met him…” I pulled at the threads of her various stories. “She once said, ‘I met your dad in a gutter.’ No, she said a drug-house gutter. Then, she asked if that was the stuff I wanted hear about. When I didn’t say anything, she said that’s what she thought. I was sixteen.”
“Well, if it’s the man I think, he wasn’t a drug addict. He was a doctor who people called on to help them when they didn’t have other options.”
“Was?” My spine chilled. What if it was too late?
Griffin held up a hand. “He’s not dead. He’s retired. If this is the right guy. I don’t want to get your hopes up until we investigate more, but my dad’s attorney referred me to the private investigator. He found a reference to her past employers in one of her arrest records in Houston. It would have been a little over a year before you were born. On her record, it showed that after completing a stint in a county rehab, she secured employment at a clinic in the Third Ward called Houston Hope Community Health. That was the last employer listed on her paperwork until she relocated to Dallas about six months before you were born.”
She had come home then, saying nothing about the man who fathered me. Everyone assumed the worst, and the stories she eked out over the years seemed to confirm it. Could it have all been a misdirection?
“The detective thinks my father was a doctor at this clinic? What’s his name? How can you be so sure?” The questions flooded out of me the minute they exploded in my head.
Griffin licked his fingertips and sifted through the papers in front of him. “It was something she said. I said he sounded like a prince, and she made a joke about his being a knight instead. When I saw the list of doctors who founded the clinic where she worked, this guy’s name stood out.”
He plucked a stapled set of papers from his stack and handed them to me. It was an article from Christmas of last year in the Houston Chronicle about a man named, Dr. Henry Knight, a doctor, philanthropist, and community activist who ran free health clinics in neighborhoods all around the city and mobile clinics for the homeless out of his van. The piece featured a picture of a tall, elderly black man standing with his arm around a slender, white-haired woman turned toward him with her hand on the center of his chest.
“Dr. Henry Knight, 73, and his wife of fifty-two years, Yolanda Knight, co-chairs of the annual Houston Hospital Alliance Black and White Holiday Gala,” I read aloud and scanned the article with tears gathering in my eyes. “Dr. Knight and his wife adopted six children after being unable to have children of their own. ‘It was hard at the beginning because I wanted to be a mother in the worst way. It didn’t
happen the way we thought, but this is even better because we got to choose our family. Our kids are our greatest achievement,’ said Mrs. Knight.’ They adopted their first child, Dr. Emilio Knight, a Houston-area oncologist, in 1976 when he was three.”
I dropped the paper. That was right before I was born. The smiling man in the photo was tall and fit with a wide, straight smile that reminded me of Katerina.
I couldn’t get ahead of myself.
“So this guy is a pillar of the community, desperate to have children, and I’m to believe he knocks up his drug-dependent receptionist and leaves her to raise his biological child by herself while he adopts a passel of orphans? That doesn’t make sense.”
Griffin sighed. “I don’t know. But there’s more.” He handed me another article from several years ago and pointing out a highlighted paragraph.
This time, I read it silently.
The doctor named the Delilah Knight Health Center for Women after his mother who died in childbirth when he was twelve. The infant also died, and Knight said losing his mother to a complication that could have been prevented with proper prenatal care still motivates him today. “Some women have to choose between feeding the children they have and getting proper care for themselves and their unborn children. That’s not a choice women in America should have to make,” he said.
“Maybe you’re not named after a biblical harlot to spite your grandparents,” Griffin said. “And now that you have more to go on, you could always ask your mother to make sure.”
“Zola’s never wanted to give me answers. Why would she start now?” I snapped. “Maybe I could reach out to Dr. Knight directly.”
Griffin blanched, and a wary tremor flickered through me.
“What?”
“I asked your mother more questions—like if he knew about you—and she didn’t answer. She said she didn’t want you jumping into his life and causing him problems.”
I flinched, and he leaped to elaborate.
“I’m not saying you’re a problem. I’m just reporting what your mom said. It could be that she didn’t want to cause him a problem with his wife, knowing they had fertility problems and were about to adopt. Or maybe she was afraid he’d take you away from her. She wasn’t exactly stable. She might not have told him about you at all. It seems like she abruptly quit working at the clinic and moved back to Dallas.”
I poured through newest article again and marveled at the notion this man could be my biological father. “She moved back in with my grandparents and gave birth to me here. The timeline adds up. This could really be him.”
“I’ll bet if you asked your mother about him now, she’d tell you what you wanted to know. It’s like what you told me about Marisa. If she’s desperate enough to stop you from talking to Dr. Knight, then she may finally tell you the truth. The threat of paternity testing is a powerful thing.”
The impact of Griffin’s discovery hit me. “I can’t believe you did this.”
He slid the folder across the desk. “Here’s everything the PI found, including his report. I wasn’t sure what I had would be enough for him to go on, but I thought it was worth a try. We got really lucky.”
I sniffled and let the tears fall. “I used to think you were the luckiest guy alive. You would only half plan and wander into a meeting or a situation, and everything would fall into place.”
He stared at me. “I’ve doubted my luck of late.”
“It’s not luck. You pay attention and stay in the moment, then take your opportunities. It works for you.”
“Mostly.”
“I’m sorry for what I said about you and your decision not to say anything to Grace. I got a serious tongue lashing from Clarissa and Katerina about my control issues.”
“Your heart is always in the right place. I know that,” he said.
“Maybe, but you were right. I was projecting my wounds onto Grace. And I was treating you like you don’t know how to run your life. I said some shitty things to you and with all you’re going through…” My voice dissolved into sobs.
“It’s okay.”
Griffin walked around the desk, kneeling beside my chair.
“No, it’s not. It’s unforgivable,” I cried.
“Then, I must really be a hell of guy because I forgive you.”
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and exhaled. “You found my father.”
“I think so.”
“Even if it’s not him, you narrowed down where my mother was, and it must be someone connected to that clinic.” I snagged a tissue from my purse and wiped my face, then picked up the article again, staring at the man in the photo.
Griffin traced my cheek with his finger. “You know.”
“Hmm?”
“You keep looking at that picture, and there’s something in it that’s familiar. You know that’s the guy.”
“I do. It’s strange. It’s exciting. It’s scary. What if he did know about me and just didn’t want to look back?” The thought of the rejection made me feel like a little girl again, ashamed and longing.
“Then, he’d be a fool,” Griffin said.
“He has an entire family and a life. And,” I laughed, feeling the weight of the irony on my shoulders, “I’m not sure I want to ruin his whole life just because I need some kind of closure.”
Griffin kissed my hand. “You don’t have to decide everything right this minute. Take a look at the information from the PI, then take a breath. You’ll figure out what to do.”
“You’re right.” I blew out a breath I’d been holding my entire life and felt lighter and calmer than I ever had. “I know it shouldn’t make a difference, but I feel better thinking that he’s a doctor and not a junkie. Does that make me a bad person?”
He ran his lips over my knuckles. His warm breath sent tingles up my arms. “No, it does not make you a bad person to not want both your parents to be drug addicts.”
“It’s kind of elitist, though, and classist. He’s a doctor, so he’s a good person? He could be a raging asshole, and the one thing we know is that he probably cheated on his devoted wife.”
“Read the articles. There’s more than one. If he’s a raging asshole, he hides it well. He’s dedicated his life to community health and raised money for all kinds of causes. Even the most upstanding people can make devastating mistakes.”
“I have trouble with that one.”
“I noticed.”
“It makes me difficult.”
“I don’t mind difficult.”
“And bitchy and controlling.”
He kissed his fingertips with a pronounced “mwah.”
“Bitchy and controlling are two of my favorite qualities in a good-hearted woman.”
“Whew. Lucky me, I guess.”
I found more articles about his kids—all doctors and lawyers and activists. I’d always wondered if there were other children out there with my DNA. It sounded like the answer might be no, but he did have children. Would they be my brothers and sisters?
I drowned in those thoughts until Griffin pulled me out and pulled me up, tugging on my hands. “I think this calls for a proper, not awkward, and fully intentional hug.”
I wound my arms around his neck, and our bodies came together. His skin was fresh, and he smelled like citrus and mint and hints of lavender. His neck was an inch from my mouth.
I shouldn’t.
I didn’t know where we stood. This hug was less awkward, but my emotions still spun.
But he’d done this impossible thing for me, filling in gaps in my past.
His body felt like home base.
And he smelled soooo good.
So, I did it. The cord of his neck was taut, but the skin soft, on the tip of my tongue.
“De-li-lah, did you just lick me?”
“Uh huh.” The lick turned into a suckling kiss.
“I have meetings tomorrow. How am I supposed to explain a hickey?”
“I don’t know. Think on your feet, Funny
Boy.”
Griffin pulled away, his face turning serious as he sat on the edge of the desk. “Are you sure you’re comfortable taking this thing with Grace day by day? I’m still asking you to keep her paternity a secret.”
“No. You’re asking me to trust you, and I do.” I kissed him to seal the promise to him and to myself.
He held my face tight in his hands and dropped his face close. Forehead to forehead. Nose to nose. And he smiled. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
“Move in with me,” he said.
“That’s sudden.”
“No, I’ve been thinking about this. I miss having in my bed. I miss waking up to your body curled up next to mine.” He savored my mouth again and sighed. Warm comfort seeped into my bones.
“Hmm, you know what?” he asked.
“What?”
“Scrap moving in.”
“You don’t want me pressed against you every day?” I pushed between his legs and ground into him.
“I do. I just had a better idea.”
I laughed.
“Marry me,” he said.
“Oh, God, another round of wedding planning might send me to an early grave,” I chuckled and kissed him again. His eyes were round, waiting. “You’re serious.”
“I am. It hit me, and this is totally what I want.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t have a ring right now, but I can get that sorted shortly. I have this friend who is very efficient at executing my great ideas.”
“I’m not buying my own ring.”
“I’m joking. I’ll get you a proper ring. In fact, hold your answer to the question on the floor until I do. In the meantime, you can think about it.”
I gasped. He kissed my forehead.
“I can’t leave this question just hanging there. I have an answer.”
He shook his head. “No, nope. This isn’t how it should go. Let me plan something. Come on, I did a good job on Valentine’s.”
I opened my mouth to answer him anyway, and he placed his finger on my lips.
“Let me surprise you.”
I swallowed the “yes” poised on my lips and decided to let him.