Page 47 of My Super Sexy Spy
I folded my arms over my chest and crossed my legs. “You’re on the clock, old man. Say what you want to say and be done with it.”
“Your mother was a…a…a beautiful woman once upon a time.”
I held up my hand. “Spare me. She’s off limits as far as this conversation is concerned. Because I don’t know who I’m more disappointed in as a parent.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. “I know you believe I abandoned you.” Breath. “I know you may think I just learned of who you are.” Breath. “But I’ve known about you since your birth.”
“So you knew my mom was pregnant, yet you did nothing about it.”
“Not.” Breath. “Nothing.” Breath.
I waited while he took the time to fill his lungs with oxygen.
“I couldn’t be in your life—”
“Why not?” I cut him off. Because that seemed like an easy excuse. I just couldn’t be in your life. Sorry. No dad for you.
“The work,” he sighed heavily. “What I was doing was always so dangerous. I’ve always been a target for people around the world who want my work, want my knowledge, want me to fix their ailing nuclear reactors. If they knew I had a daughter…”
I nodded. Having been a target of spies recently, I got where he was going with this. He was afraid I’d be used to force him to do some evil dude’s bidding.
“It’s only now,” he breathed. “At the end. When they can’t hurt me or use me anymore that I wanted to do this one last thing for you. But I never forgot about you. Never stopped trying to help you.”
That had me raising an eyebrow. I didn’t remember a lot of help growing up.
“I sent your mother support payments. Monthly. Sadly, she eventually used all of that money to support her drug habit. I begged her to get help for your sake. There were times she did. Enough that I thought you were better off with her than CPS.”
He wasn’t wrong. There were times she’d gotten clean. Once, when I was eleven. That had been a good year. Then the she’d fallen off the wagon. When I was thirteen, she’d tried again and had stayed clean for six months before she’d reverted to her old habits.
It sort of made sense she’d been getting support payments all that time. Her waitressing job paid shit but still we’d had an apartment. There had been food. Even when she was using. Until the drugs completely took over and I knew I had to leave to live.
I looked at the man sitting across from me. The man dying across from me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel now. A sense of connection?
Gratitude?
“Fuck that!” I said, angry at myself for even thinking of forgiving him. “I was seventeen when I left home. For over a year I lived day to day stealing what I could to survive. Where were you then? Where were your support payments then?”
He nodded as if acknowledging his sins. “I wasn’t there. I’d been in Germany…working. I didn’t know you’d left your mother.”
“No, you were not there.” I stood then and started to pace the room. Walking toward the window, I tried to focus on the ornate iron work on the windows across the street. To commit them to memory so I could write about them later, but right now all I saw was the past.
Huddled up under an overpass at night. My knees pulled in on themselves so tight I was practically folded in half. Rain coming down on either side of the street. Watching as someone pulled up to a corner bar and got out of his car and failed to lock it.
Inside, a cell phone I could sell. A change cup with almost thirty dollars in quarters. A hundred-dollar bill that must have fallen out of his wallet and settled under the driver’s seat.
I took it all. And I lived another day.
So that I could be here looking at ornate iron work on a Paris building across the street.
“I wasn’t there with you,” he sighed. “But the investigator I’d hired to keep tabs on you finally told me you’d left home. I thought…of approaching you then. Finding you…but after all this time, I didn’t think you would believe me.”
That my long-lost father was a nuclear scientist and wanted to help me? No, I wasn’t entirely sure I would have believed that. It wouldn’t have felt any more real than it did now.
“I tried to help you as best I could. I considered reporting you to Child Protective Services, but I was scared for you. Growing up, I came from that system in Italy. It wasn’t a good environment for me. So I did what I could. Contributed in other ways.”
I turned around and glared at him. “I don’t remember any special contributions.”
I remembered hunger and fear.
