Finding Her Dad

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He could see Edie ticking off one point on her mental checklist.

  “All right. We may still be able to slide out of this. Is Ms. Malone likely to go to the media?”

  He violently rejected the idea. “No. For God’s sake.”

  Edie scrutinized him with shrewd eyes in which, surprisingly, he read sympathy. “Is she aware you’re planning to remove your daughter from her home?”

  Did she know how much she sounded like an attorney questioning a defendant on the stand? Or perhaps he was a witness. She was chipping away at his resistance, trying to focus him on the central point. For her, that was doing whatever necessary to get him elected.

  That’s what he’d hired her for. The anger bubbling in him wasn’t fair. Jon knew that. He also suspected Edie knew he was feeling it. Did she have any idea that he had loved Lucy? That he was bleeding internally?

  He gave his head a shake. It didn’t matter. Lucy had lied to him, if only by omission. She had to have known she was putting at risk something that mattered hugely to him. Worse yet, she’d been willing to put Sierra at risk. That was the part he really couldn’t grapple with. She’d rescued a teenager left alone in the world, taken her into her home and arms and heart. How did she reconcile that with exposing Sierra to a woman who’d walked out of a drug treatment center and scored herself an illegal prescription within hours? A woman who always found a man. How had Lucy put it? She’d get, I don’t know, mixed up in what they were doing. Yeah, as if Mommy had stumbled into a situation in her innocence. Happened to be at his side when the latest boyfriend pulled a .38 on an eighteen-year-old clerk at a Gas N Shop.

  He had trouble believing Lucy could be that delusional. Yet he had to believe it, because he didn’t have any choice.

  “If Sierra is living with me, I may have to introduce her. Our press packet says I don’t have any children.”

  “And it wouldn’t look good if you suddenly have a teenage girl living with you,” Edie agreed. “But we probably have a few days to pick our time and place.”

  “All right.” He looked at the lunch he’d barely touched. His stomach did a slow roll and he pushed the plate away before pulling his wallet out. “Anything else?”

  “No. We’re covered.” Edie slid out of the booth. She hesitated as he peeled a couple of bills off and dropped them on the small tray with the check. “Jon…”

  He glanced up, taken aback to hear anything tentative from a woman so confident and bracing that no candidate she was shepherding into office was ever allowed to have a doubt.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.” She gave one brisk nod, turned and walked away, leaving him staring after her in surprise.

  WOULDN’T YOU KNOW that, on a day when Lucy would have given anything to be nonstop busy, the store would be dead? Downtown generally was slow. There was scarcely any traffic passing in front of her windows. She had no appointments with food or supply reps. No need for an inventory. No ordering waiting for her attention.

  Lucy dusted. She rearranged the back room. Straightened canned food on shelves until the stacks were as perfectly aligned and impressive as an architectural model. She ached for the sound of the bell over the door. Almost wept when one of her regulars came in with her dumb-as-a-box silver-tip Persian, who was on a harness and leash but actually rode around clutched to Olive Parson’s shoulder. Lucy had never actually seen the cat stand on her own four feet. Mrs. Parsons had laughingly admitted that Tabitha’s favorite occupation at home was sitting in front of the floor-length mirror in the bedroom gazing at herself.

  Gratefully Lucy chatted with her as she rang up a sale of the same food and litter Mrs. Parsons always bought. As always, the Persian declined to even sniff the proffered goody. Given her squished face and nonexistent nose, she probably couldn’t smell.

  Mrs. Parsons chuckled and said, “My, what a picky eater.”

  Left alone again, Lucy wondered bleakly whether this day would ever end.

  She hadn’t had to make any explanations to Sierra last night, thank goodness. Either she’d genuinely been asleep, or she’d known by osmosis that Lucy was desperate not to talk.

  When Lucy stumbled out of her bedroom this morning, eyes half-swollen shut, Sierra had said hurriedly, “Forgot to tell you I have to go early today. I’m talking to Ms. Abrams about being a TA.” She eyed Lucy warily. “Did something happen with Dad?”

  Lucy nodded. “He found out about my mother being released from prison. He’s…not happy.”

  Book bag slung over her shoulder, Sierra didn’t move. “Oh.”

  “How are you getting to school early?”

  “Carlos Gomez. He’s a senior, and yes, Mama Lucy, he’s had his license long enough to be allowed to drive me.”

  Lucy nodded. Carlos was a nice kid, half a head shorter than Sierra and therefore unlikely to be a romantic interest. He was part of Sierra’s crowd of computer nerds and geniuses. After he’d earned a perfect score on the math side of the SAT, a teacher had encouraged him to apply to MIT as well as his local choices. “Okay,” she said. “See you this afternoon.”

  Sierra surprised her by rushing forward and giving her a brief, hard hug before dashing out the door.

  As the day wore on, Lucy’s depression morphed into anger. She was a good, law-abiding person who was not responsible for her mother’s crimes. And her mom, who was responsible for them, had served her time. She’d accepted her punishment, and now she had a right to be treated like a human being. Apparently Jon Brenner thought every kid who shoplifted should be locked away for life in the special offenders’ unit at the correctional institute. Didn’t he believe anyone ever learned from a mistake? Was rehabilitated? Kicked a drug habit?

  Dumb question. No, he didn’t.

  She’d brought a book but couldn’t concentrate enough to read. Come late afternoon, she was perched on her stool behind the old-fashioned wooden counter brooding when the door opened and Jon and Sierra walked in.

  Lucy’s gaze flew first to Jon’s face, as blank and hard as it had been last night, then to Sierra’s distraught one. Her heart clenched.

  “Lucy!” Sierra flew to her.

  Lucy was still on the stool when the teenager flung herself at her, almost knocking her off. Lucy’s arms closed hard around Sierra. For one minute she let herself press her cheek to her foster daughter’s bright blue head, close her eyes and fiercely hug this girl she loved so much. Then she let one arm drop and straightened, looking past Sierra to her father.

  “Sierra’s coming home with me,” he said with no apparent emotion at all.

  “Because I’m so incapable of keeping her safe.”

  “Because you’re using bad judgment.”

  She kept her chin high. “You mean I value family, and I believe people are capable of redemption.”

  His expression never changed; there was no flicker of compassion in his eyes. “Your mother’s had more than enough chances at redemption. She’s flunked every one.”

  Sierra shivered in Lucy’s embrace. Despite the tsunami of anguish rising in her, Lucy knew they couldn’t keep arguing in front of her. And maybe he was even right. Maybe she was using bad judgment; maybe her mom didn’t deserve even the pathetic remnants of love Lucy still felt. In this single instant, under his stony gaze, Lucy shriveled inside. She was a child again, living with the humiliation of having a parent in prison, of having a home only because the state paid someone to provide it. She was the little girl who knew she wasn’t important enough to her own mommy to change anything, who knew she didn’t have a daddy because he didn’t even want to know she existed. She felt incredibly small, meaningless, useless, and she hated Jon for stripping her of all her hard-gained self-esteem.

  She had to get them out of there before she fell apart.

  She tilted her head so that she didn’t have to see him. “Honey,” she whispered, for Sierra alone. “It’s okay. He’s your dad.”

  Sierra pulled back to look at her with damp eyes.

  L
ucy cupped her face. “You have to give him a chance. I’ll always be here if you need me. I promise.”

  Tears overflowed and trickled down Sierra’s cheeks. Her mascara ran. Lucy knew she’d crack any minute. “Please,” she whispered. “Right now it’s the best thing to do.”

  The teenager bobbed her head. She gave Lucy a last, fervent hug then fled the store.

  “I’m sorry it came to this,” Jon said quietly.

  Lucy glared at him. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare. What you’ve done is hateful. You’re no better than my father. You got—what?—a couple hundred bucks for the sperm that created Sierra? You never gave a thought to her. You weren’t there when she really needed you. And you have the gall to be sanctimonious with me? I want you to leave. Now. Before I call 911 and have you arrested for custodial interference. Because we both know who has legal custody, and it isn’t you.”

  Their gazes held for an excruciating moment, then he walked out.

  Lucy sat very still for a minute. Two minutes. When a sob racked her, she slid from the stool and rushed to the front door, where she flipped the sign from Open to Closed and turned the deadbolt lock. She barely made it to her back room before the first tears fell. Her fingers gripped the back of the desk chair, but it didn’t hold her up. She crumpled to the floor, buried her face in her arms and cried.

  “YOU SAID YOU’D FOUND me an apartment?” her mother asked.

  They were driving across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which soared so high over Puget Sound, it always scared Lucy. The lanes felt too narrow, her hands sweaty on the steering wheel. Going and coming, this had always been her most dreaded part of the trip to visit her mother. Even worse than having to be searched.

  “I haven’t told you, but Sierra isn’t living with me anymore,” she said. “She’s gone to stay with her dad.”

  Her mother was watching her anxiously. “Not because of me?”

  Lucy’s first thought was bitter. Yes. Yes! Entirely because of you. All the anger of her childhood hurled words she wanted to say so badly that holding them back was a battle she barely won.

  But then she had a strange and surprising realization. She didn’t even know where it came from. It wasn’t because of her mom that Jon had snatched Sierra away. He’d done it because of his own narrow-minded, intolerant views. Perhaps because of his own, unhealed wounds.

  But that, Lucy thought, still bitterly, was an excuse, and he didn’t believe in those.

  The most painful part was her awareness that in taking Sierra away he’d shown that he hadn’t felt anything very important for her, Lucy. Not even trust. Not even enough liking to motivate him to listen to her. To talk about compromises.

  After a long, throat-aching moment, aware of her mother waiting, Lucy admitted, “He didn’t like it that you’d be around, but that wasn’t the whole story. He and Sierra were getting along so well, sooner or later it made sense for her to live with him. She didn’t need a foster home anymore.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Lucy saw her mother’s face contort before she averted it.

  “I don’t want to make trouble, and I already am.”

  Thank God they were leaving the bridge behind. Lucy wriggled her shoulders to relax them, but it didn’t work. Too much of her tension had to do with her passenger.

  “I’ve promised Sierra I’d be available if she needs me,” she said. “In the meantime, there’s no reason you can’t have my spare bedroom. I assume that eventually you’ll want your own place, but you can save money by staying with me for now, at least until you find a job.”

  “If you’re sure.” Lucy felt the weight of her mother’s troubled gaze.

  Mom had aged terribly these past eight years. It wasn’t as though Lucy hadn’t seen her; most months she’d visited. But somehow seeing her now, outside the prison gates, changed Lucy’s perspective. Her mom’s light brown hair was graying. Her skin looked older than it should for her years. Once a pretty woman, now she was thin and brittle. She was—Lucy calculated quickly—almost fifty. Her birthday was coming up in November, right before Thanksgiving.

  That meant she’d been twenty-one when she got pregnant with Lucy. Twenty-two when she had her. Not very old at all.

  In fact, the same age Jon had been when he’d thought selling his sperm was a fine and dandy idea. Lucy wished she could point that out to him.

  She looked away from the road briefly to her mother’s hands, wringing together in her lap. The knuckles looked knobbier than they should.

  She frowned. “You’re getting arthritis.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Her mom’s hands stilled, and she looked ruefully at them. “My mother got arthritis early, too. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Lucy didn’t know much at all about her grandparents, whom she’d never met. They had cut their daughter off before Lucy was born, and not relented even for the sake of their granddaughter. Her grandmother had been forty when Mom was born, Lucy did know that, her grandfather four years older. Terry had talked about how rigid and stern they’d been compared to her friends’ parents. Even if they’d been willing, Lucy could see that taking in a baby when they were in their sixties wouldn’t have been ideal. Not that it mattered, since they weren’t willing. She knew they’d been contacted several times when she was cast on the state as a dependent of the court. She’d always wondered, secretly, whether they’d rejected her because she was half-Hispanic and looked it. Had they despised the part of her that was her mother…or the part that was her father?

  Automatically blocking off old hurts, Lucy said, “You’ll have to tell me more about them. If nothing else, I ought to know health issues. That kind of thing.”

  “I don’t know what kind of health problems they had later on. They were healthy the last time I saw them.” Terry was quiet for a moment. “I tried calling them about ten or eleven years ago. Papa answered. All he said was, ‘Your mother has passed away,’ and then he hung up on me.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a shock. Your grandmother would have been eighty. Imagine that.” She shook her head. “I just felt the need to try. Hearing she’d died and I’d never even had a chance to say I was sorry…” Her mouth worked. “That hurt.”

  “I can imagine,” Lucy said quietly. Too well. Wasn’t she in the same boat, needing closure that might not be possible? Except she was the one who was supposed to forgive, not the other way around.

  For all practical purposes, she had realized long ago, she was the parent, not the daughter. She ought to be empathizing with her grandparents rather than with her mother.

  Terry hadn’t rebelled until she was seventeen and started dating a boy who introduced her to alcohol and parties. By the time she was twenty, her parents had ordered her from the house. Lucy couldn’t help wondering whether her mother’s life would have been different if they’d fought a little harder for her.

  It was part of the reason Lucy hadn’t yet been able to say enough. And maybe that made her foolish, but she’d rather be a soft touch than as icy and unforgiving inside as Jon.

  She wasn’t the only tense one in the car. Her mom’s fingers writhed, betraying her growing anxiety. This must be terribly frightening. All the times she’d failed before had to be on her mind. Lucy guessed her own mixed feelings must be obvious. The chance of successfully reintegrating into society would have to be higher for someone being released from prison into a stable family offering a real welcome and love. Lucy, racked with ambivalence, wasn’t a very solid foundation to build on.

  I’m better than nothing, she reminded herself.

  “Did you check into NA and AA meetings?” her mother asked suddenly, and Lucy realized their thoughts had paralleled.

  “Yes. You can attend one or the other every day, if you want.” Narcotics Anonymous meetings were held in the back room of a local coffee shop, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at a grange hall. “All within walking distance.” Lucy turned onto her own st
reet. “Here we are,” she said brightly.

  “Oh.” Terry leaned forward. She’d seen photos of Lucy’s small house and garden. Now her face lit up at the sight of it. “Oh, honey. It’s beautiful.”

  A rush of emotion tightened Lucy’s throat. “I knew you’d like the garden. I wish you’d seen it earlier, when it was at its height. Next year—” But she couldn’t finish, because who knew about next year?

  After she parked, they set her mom’s bag on the front porch and Lucy gave her a tour of the garden. A few roses still bloomed, and some late perennials were only now starting to fade. Foliage had turned to gold and scarlet and orange. The garden smelled richer than at any other time of the year, as if the sweet scent of flowers had masked something deeper. The earth itself.

  “I’m glad you like to garden,” her mother said softly.

  “I got it from you.”

  They looked at each other and smiled, really smiled, for the first time, as if this one thing mother had passed to daughter gave them enough connection to offer hope.

  Please God, Lucy thought, wishing she could trust that hope.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  APPROACHING SIERRA’S BEDROOM, Jon was surprised to hear his daughter’s voice coming beneath the door. Did she have a friend over?

  But then, as though she’d heard his footsteps, she said a hasty “Bye, Lucy.”

  Two words, two kicks to his chest. The boot delivering the kicks was steel toed.

  Jon went still, his knuckles an inch from the paneled door. He fought a silent battle with himself, trying to believe it was the grief in Sierra’s voice that hurt, but knowing he was lying to himself.

  He wanted to talk to Lucy, to say, I think I might have screwed up. But the more rational side of him didn’t think he had, and he couldn’t talk to her when he was at war with himself. Assuming she was even willing to talk to him. And why would she be? He’d hurt her, and badly. He knew he had.