Page 41 of Enemies in Earnest

“No, of course not. Your husband is correct, Marley. You do not owe me any assurances. I fear I am the one who owes you a lifetime of explanations. My silence is not because of you. You simply caught me off guard.”

While we sat in a corner booth and chatted, I took an inventory of his likenesses and tried to find anything that tied my DNA to his. While tall, he was thicker than my mom and me. She and I were both pretty petite. I had my mom’s blue eyes. Asher’s were dark brown. The deeper set of his eyes didn’t align with mine, nor did his aristocratic nose or his narrow lips. Maybe we were wrong all along. And while she had a crush on Asher or loved him, a college boyfriend or someone else was the one who actually knocked her up.

“Do you think it’s possible?” I asked. “That you could be my dad? I mean, the dates lineup, but I’m looking at you trying to find even the slightest similarities and I’m coming up empty.”

I didn’t want to go through this again. We’d been on the hunt since our wedding day. If Asher wasn’t my dad, I didn’t think I had the emotional strength to ride this roller coaster again.

Asher looked over his shoulder at all the bustle surrounding us.

“Would the two of you like to come back to my home? I’m just around the corner. We could take my golf cart if you’d like.”

Ted looked over at me and shrugged. It seemed silly to deny an invite to his house. Especially if he was, in fact, my dad.

Candy Cane Key was a sweet little town. There was no way you could keep a secret in a town as small as that. It seemed like everyone was in each other’s business.

“I hope it doesn’t rain.” He pointed toward the clouds that seemed to approach the coast on a mission.

Asher jingled the keys in his pocket, unlocking the door to a sweet robin’s egg blue A-frame with a cobblestone path lined with magnolia trees. I don’t know if I had an expectation of what my dad’s house would look like—whomever my dad ended up being—I don’t know if Asher’s home would have ever been in any of my wildest imaginations.

Despite the beachy vibe of the street and the typical Florida Keys appearance of his neighborhood, his inside screamed old time Downton Abby library. I half expected a butler to appear and take my coat. I’d never seen so many bookshelves, let alone so many books in my life.

“I have some photos upstairs in my study.” He pointed to the six steps that separated the first and second floors. “Please have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

Ted signaled for me to take one of the leather wingback chairs. Rather than sit as well, he chose instead to work out our shared anxiety by pacing around the room. Every so often he’d stop and stare at some artifact that sat on a shelf, or a book on display.

“I wanted a simpler life when I retired here.” Asher laughed to himself, pointing to his overflowing shelves and brick-a-brac that were scattered around. “But when push came to shove, there were too many things I just couldn’t get rid of. So my quaint little home isn’t nearly as minimalist as I’d hoped.”

He took the chair opposite me and placed a large box on the table. This moment had been so long coming, and now that it was here? My body didn’t know how to react. It thrilled me to get some answers, maybe some closure, and hopefully—if I was truly being honest—a path forward. But I needed to protect my stupid heart. It was already a trilling damn songbird, planning to expand the nest.

“I grew up in Vermont. It was me, my sister Cecily, and my brother Jonas.” Asher pulled out pictures from the box and showed me old black and white photos of the three of them playing in the snow and running around a pine tree covered backyard.

“Look at this.” I passed a picture of him and his sister to Ted.

“If not for the black and white—this could be Nick and Tillie.”

Hearing Ted give voice to exactly what I’d been thinking brought a wave of tears. I’d spent the afternoon trying to figure out where Asher was in my genes. I’d seen nothing that even hinted at our being related. My kids though? Absolutely no doubt. Tillie had a sweet little button nose that turned up at the end. Through their infancy Ted and I had marveled at them morphing and growing and assumed that her and her brother’s looks must have been from Ted’s unknown family members. The three Krane kids all sported curly hair in one form of another. While my hair was wavy, I did not inherit the thick ringlets that they had.

“Your grandkids.” I woke up my iPhone and showed Asher the wallpaper on my phone, which was set to our last holiday card photo. “They’re two and a half. Tillie Joy and Nicholas Charles.”

Asher took my phone and stared at it for a long, silent moment.

“I never thought—” his voice caught as he tried to finish his sentence. “My whole adult life, I mourned the loss of this. Not having any family. My brother has already passed and my sister and I don’t get to see one another very often. And as you get to be my age, you think about your own mortality. Your legacy. What you’ve shared with the world. Despite leaving my mark at Dartmouth, I never got to experience this.”

He handed my phone back to me. Something about looking him right in his wrinkled eyes that had me vibrating with empathy. Hope. He looked at me with hope in those eyes. As if seeing my family had him hoping that perhaps he too, could become part of us.

“They’re a handful.” Ted said, “Double the trouble. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

Asher pushed himself out of his chair, mumbling something about drinks and food. While he busied himself brewing a pot of coffee based on the smell, and assembling some cookies on a plate based on the sounds, Ted flipped through more of Asher’s childhood photos. Occasionally he’d hold one up for me to see, as if to show me even more proof that we’d found our familial missing link.

“I know you want to know about your mom,” Asher began as he passed out the coffee mugs. “I’m happy to tell you anything I can. But I also have to admit I’m a little nervous. I know from where you sit that it probably seems terribly wrong for me to have had any kind of relationship with someone thirty years my junior. But Joy was so incredibly intelligent I often forgot she was only eighteen.

“She came to campus in the summer.” He looked out the front window of his house, lost in thought. “There was a summer theater workshop for all incoming freshmen who were considering pursuing theater as a major—which Joy was. The professors working the summer theater intensive were paired up with three of four students to work on monologues, group work, have them get acclimated to the quicker pace of college theater. And, of course, introduce them to the rich, complicated prose of Shakespeare. That was our bread and butter. Dartmouth’s Shakespeare festival is world renown. There is an expectation that we deliver the highest theatrical standard. Our summer programs and degrees were highly competitive. I don’t want to get too far into the details and embarrass you.” He continued, “but being with Joy was addictive, intoxicating. She saw the word through fresh eyes, and having a woman who had never experienced more than the shy fumblings of a teenager—it was all I could think about, introducing her to the world of an adult sexual relationship. I guess the thrill of sneaking around made it even more salacious.”

The words sat heavy and thick on my tongue. I desperately wanted to know. Needed to. But also I didn’t want to give voice to the question I knew, in my bones, I already had the answer to.

My mom had to shoulder the burden of a mistake that took two people to make. Her whole life flew out the window the day that strip turned pink. Joy Jacobs morphed from an eighteen-year-old with a superhighway in front of her to an unmarried, pregnant teen with limited options in a small mountain town. She had been my sun and my moon. Every scratch and bruise, fear and worry, as well as every happiness, no matter how large or small, were rooted deep within her memories.

As a mom now myself, I struggled to wrap my head around how my mom did it. She was an exiled daughter, with no money and few skills, trying to make it on her own with barely enough money to afford the basics.

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