Page 69 of Promise Me Nothing
He nods. “Totally. One hundred percent. And I’ll never expect you to pick someone. Like your loyalty to me can only come if you say your dad is a dick, or something.”
I laugh.
But then his expression sobers. “But I also hope you can see that hewasn’tthat dad to me. He might have done some fun stuff when I was a kid, taking me surfing and whatever, but he never called during the year. Never checked in. Didn’t send a card on my birthday. So the guy I knew? He was just a man. A man that stopped coming around when…”
Lucas pauses, and I wait patiently for him to finish.
“Well… he just stopped coming around.”
I feel like he’s not telling me something, but with our emotions on high, I don’t want to push.
“So my only feelings about him have always been a little… different than yours,” he says, picking a piece of his crust up off of his plate and taking a bite, then glancing at the TV.
I’ve seen this episode before, and it’s one of my favorites. Hearing David Attenborough talk about nature is one of the most heartwarming things that exists.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, just listening to the Brit and allowing quite a large chunk of the next episode to play with only a few pieces of funny commentary from either of us.
Though, I can barely call what I’m doinglistening.All I can think about is that my dad was a very different man than I knew him to be.
But I guess you can be a different type of dad than you are as a type of man. You can treat your children better, or worse, than your spouse.
Clearly I’ll need to sort through some of my memories of him and my mother. Though I’m not sure if tonight is the night for that.
“I appreciate you being willing to talk about him. To share, even if it makes you uncomfortable,” Lucas adds. Then he looks back to me. “My memories of Henry are minimal, and I’ll never get to know Joshua. So my only way to understand them is through you.”
I nod, though my throat is tight and I don’t add much more after that. Hopefully there will be another time for us to have a chat. A time when my memories of my dad won’t feel so fragile.
Because that’s how they feel right now. Like they might shatter and break at any moment.
And I know that’s not Lucas’ fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, really. Except for my dad.
And that’s a big and uncomfortable pill to swallow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wyatt
My parents told us we were adopted when I was really young. Probably around kindergarten, if I had to guess. It’s a hard concept for a child that young to understand. When you’re little, the idea that a parent wouldn’t want their child, so they gave him or her to someone else… it’s pretty startling.
But it wasn’t until I was in junior high and my mom got pregnant with Ivy that it started to consume my mind. I had to know who myrealparents were. Because it felt like I didn’t really know who I was if I didn’t know where I came from.
The P.I. was surprised to get hired by a child, I think, but when a person gives you a job and waves a Black AmEx, it doesn’t matter how old they are.
It took him thirteen months to find my parents. He came by my house with a file of paperwork, a fairly thin stack, and let me know he’d found everything he could.
I waited almost a month before I had the courage to open that file. To look through the pieces of my past that I worried would change me forever.
Ultimately, the entire thing was exactly what I expected. A too young couple in high school tried to raise Ben. But when they became pregnant again with me a year later, they decided adoption for both of us would give everyone the best chance at a happier, more successful life.
At thirteen years old, I hired a driver to take me out to where they lived in Terra Bella, California, a town of about three thousand that’s an hour from Bakersfield. My parents were out of town at some function on the east coast, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to go meet Theo Marshall and Marie King. My birth parents.
We drove all the way there, into the mobile home park facility, and then parked outside for over an hour.
And then we left.
I never managed to muster up the courage to go introduce myself to Marie when I saw her leave her house, smoke a cigarette on the patio, then get in her car and drive away. She was leaving for work. I could tell because she had on a green polo shirt with a symbol for a local gas station.
After that, I had the driver take me home. I knew there was no reason to go by Theo’s house a few minutes away, where he still lived with his parents, my grandparents, at thirty years old.
