Page 76 of The Cadence
“Why not? He never paid a dime of child support and he allowed you to live in what I’m betting was squalor. He let you grow up without schooling or doctor visits, too, but at least he finally put you together with his mother.”
“Well,” I repeated, and stopped again. “This is a hard one. I really can’t blame him for any of that.”
“Why? Was your mom that adept at hiding you? How hard did he try to fix things?”
“It wasn’t really his responsibility. I wasn’t his responsibility, because he wasn’t really my father.”
The car swerved a little and Will forgot to accelerate until I reminded him, and when we got to the red traffic light at the endof the long Woodsmen Stadium drive, he turned to stare at me. “What do you mean that he’s not your father?”
“I knew the truth when I saw my grandma. We didn’t look anything alike and I don’t look like my mother, either. She was the same type as Kirsten, little, blonde, and curvy. And I’m a red-haired beanpole—”
“No,” he said firmly. “You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said, and it was nice to hear. “Thank you, but I’m really nothing like my mother, and I’m nothing like my grandmother. You saw her and you know. Her hair was black and so were her eyes, and she barely cleared five feet tall. Her son took after her, and then…there’s me.”
“Genetics are very weird,” he said. “I tower over my mother and my dad came up to my collarbone. There are rumors that one Bodine born during the Reconstruction was about my size, but that was generations ago.”
“There’s more, which I found out by mistake from the church ladies. My mother had also been dating someone from the university basketball team, nine or ten months before I was born. He was the center and he was thin and very tall. I looked him up and saw his red hair and hazel eyes, too, and it’s pretty clear that she lied about my paternity. Maybe she just put down her best guess on the birth certificate,” I said. “But it was still a low thing to do. She even let the man she pretended was my father choose my name, and he picked ‘Calla’ after his own mom.”
But Will was shaking his head. “Did you and your grandma ever take DNA tests?”
“The minute she saw me, she must have realized. She got a crick in her neck when she looked me in the face! But she didn’t care.” I stopped and tried to clear my throat. “She never said a word about it, because lying was ok with her if the intention was good, and if it would help someone. She never let on that she had any inkling that we weren’t really related. The first time her son saw me, when we visited him in prison, she wouldn’t let him say a word about it, either. She held up her finger when we walked toward him and shook her head. To his credit, he kept his own doubts quiet. It was probably the nicest thing he ever did.”
“You couldn’t know the truth, not for sure.”
“The truth is that it didn’t matter, not to me or to my grandma. I loved her and she loved me, even if there wasn’t any genetic tie between us. Her house was my home because she thought I belonged there, so I did. It was her love that made me belong.”
“That’s all the truth you need,” he said, and I nodded. I had come to terms with it a long time ago, but it still felt good when he reached and took my hand.
When we got home, Will made me drink some syrup for my throat and we both went to bed soon after he’d eaten. We went alone, as usual. I didn’t have work the next day but I always got up around the same time, and I expected him to sleep in. I was surprised to hear his quiet knock just as it was getting light, and he entered with a mug of coffee when I called out to him.
“Hi,” I said, and patted the bed. It was one of my favorite things to talk for a moment in the morning, before both of us got busy. “You’re up early.”
“I have some plans.” His eyebrows lowered. “If you’re feeling all right.”
“I feel fine. I was only too enthusiastic about how great you play football,” I said.
“I also thought that you might be upset by what we talked about in the car.”
I shook my head. “It was hard at first, but it was seven years ago. It’s been hard to talk about her at all but now I’m remembering more good stuff, like when she first hugged me on her porch. I’m really ok.”
He nodded, but he still looked concerned. Or maybe…tense? I wasn’t sure.
“What do you want to do today?” I glanced at the window, where the sky outside seemed very grey. “It may be too cold for me to try the beach again.”
“I have another idea,” he said. “You’ll still have to wear something warm, though.”
This was exciting. I got up fast and shooed him out so that I could get dressed and he left, laughing, and moving very well like he was mostly injury-free. I had been watching. I did get dressed in something warm, which was the new sweater that Miss Mozella had knitted for me. She was working on one forWill, too, but she was lamenting how much yarn it took. He was just too large.
Soon enough, we were done with the breakfast he’d made and were in the car, the old one. “I bought this for myself,” he noted as we backed out of the garage. “I paid off my parents’ debts first, and then I got a car.”
“Did you buy the other car when you asked me to come live here?” He hesitated but then nodded. “You spend money on everyone else,” I said. “You wanted my grandma to have some, too.”
“What would have been a better use for it than taking care of you?” he asked, and he held my hand again.
I had learned my way around a lot better, but I didn’t know where we were headed. We didn’t go too far before Will turned into the parking lot of a high school, empty now since it was Sunday and most people were probably still recuperating from the tense Woodsmen game of the day before. “What are we doing here?” I asked him. “Are you going to practice on their football field or meet some players?” He had stopped directly behind the bleachers.
“No.” He coughed and shook his head.
