The Unwelcomed Child (34 page)

None of the four television sets mounted above the mirrors was on. The ceiling looked as if it was the original, with all sorts of intricate molding. The only modern part was where some air-conditioning vents were installed. The wood floor seemed to be the original floor, too. There were tables and chairs across from the bar and at least a quarter of the bar’s length more toward the rear of the restaurant. All of the tables had tablecloths and centerpieces with fake flowers. Along the walls were many photographs, some of people who looked like celebrities from sports and entertainment, along with pictures of men who looked like politicians.

Everyone at the bar gradually turned to look at us. A hostess in light blue slacks and a white blouse came toward us quickly.

“Lunch for three?” she asked. She looked like someone barreling down on her sixties, although she could easily have been in her late forties. She wore her hair cut stylishly at her shoulders, but the light brown color seemed to emphasize her wrinkles and take away from her hazel eyes.

“No, we’re here to see Mr. Barrett, Mr. Sean Barrett,” Claudine said.

She took a step back and tightened her smile. “Is he expecting you?” she asked.

“No, this is a delightful surprise,” Claudine added. “Where would Mr. Barrett be?”

“He’s in his office. I’ll show you the way,” she said, now full of curiosity.

“What a great place,” Mason said as we started through it.

“It’s been here a long time,” she said, her smile warmer.

“Have you been here long?” Claudine asked.

“Twenty years. I started when Sean’s father was running it. This way,” she said, nodding at a door in the rear. She opened it for us. “His office is the second door on the right.”

“Thank you,” Claudine said.

The hostess saw she had two couples entering the restaurant, nodded, and headed back toward them. We walked down the short hallway. The door to the office was closed, but we could hear someone speaking. It sounded as if he was on the telephone.

“I’ll get it started,” Claudine said.

“Like we didn’t know that,” Mason told her, and smiled at me, but I could see a little nervousness now in his eyes and the way his lips quivered.

Claudine knocked on the door.

We heard the man stop talking. “What’s up?” he shouted.

Claudine opened the door.

What would anyone feel like looking at her father for the first time? The first thing I wondered about was whether I looked at all like him. He was a good-looking man with my color auburn hair neatly cut at a good length and a well-groomed goatee. But the other feature that told me this man could very well be my father was his eyes. They were the same shade of blue as mine, but they also had those tiny black dots swimming in them.

He didn’t get up, but I thought he was close to six feet tall. He looked as if he did some bodybuilding, because his shoulders were wide, and his arms, sprouting out of his strawberry-red short-sleeved shirt, were roped with muscle. He told whomever he was speaking to that he would get back to them and slowly hung up the receiver before leaning back in his black leather desk chair. He wore no watch but had a gold bracelet on his left wrist.

“Who are you?” he asked us.

“My name is Claudine Spenser. This is my brother, Mason, and this is Elle Edwards. You knew her mother, Debbie Edwards.”

He stared a moment and then sat forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “Debbie Edwards?” He started to shake his head.

“She was a student at SUNY Albany. She and her girlfriends used to hang out here. You knew her fifteen years ago. Elle is fifteen,” she added.

He raised his eyebrows. “Debbie Edwards,” he said, and looked more at me.

“Yes. Is it all coming back to you, Mr. Barrett?” Claudine asked.

“What exactly do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re looking at your daughter, Mr. Barrett,” Claudine said.

His face took on a crimson shade rapidly. “What?”

“About fifteen years ago, you put something in Debbie Edwards’s drink and had your way with her.”

“What is this?”

“We thought it was time you met your daughter,” Claudine replied, not skipping a beat or backing down an inch.

He looked at me again. “First of all, that’s a bullshit story,” he told Claudine. He started to rise.

“It’s not difficult today to prove paternity,” Mason said, sounding like a lawyer. “You know blood tests will confirm it.”

He thought a moment and sat again. “I never put anything in anyone’s drink. I was never that desperate. Look, miss,” he began, turning to me, “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but . . .”

“Her mother told her you drugged her, raped her, and left her. She was too ashamed to reveal it, even after she realized she was pregnant with your baby. She kept it a secret until it was very late, and when she finally went home to get help from her parents, they forced her to have the baby, Elle,” Mason recited.

“She’s been living a hellish life ever since,” Claudine added.

I looked at her. I knew my life was difficult, but “hellish” seemed too much.

She was on a roll and didn’t want to stop. “Her mother deserted her soon after she was born, hating her parents for forcing her to give birth, so her grandparents raised your daughter. They’re religious, insanely religious. They treated her like an evil child because she was born out of a rape.”

He shook his head. “Look,” he said more calmly. “I was a hell-raiser when I was younger. I’m not going to deny it. I went out with a lot of college girls in those days.”

“You mean you might have more illegitimate children?” Claudine said.

He opened and closed his mouth.

“We’re concerned only with Elle,” Mason said. “We thought, she thought, it was time to meet you and let you know she existed.”

“You can see the resemblances between you,” Claudine added, now sounding more reasonable. “Why deny it?”

He just stared at me for a moment.

“We’re not here to blackmail you or anything,” Mason said.

Claudine gave him a dirty look. Maybe she thought that was something we should do. It wasn’t what I wanted to do.

“I never drugged your mother so I could have sex with her,” my father told me. He looked very sincere now. “I remember her well. She was quite a flirt. We had a thing . . .”

“A thing?” Claudine said.

“A little affair. I don’t think I went with her more than a few weeks, maybe a month. She told me she was on the pill. Suddenly, one day, she stopped coming or answering my phone calls, so I gave up on her and honestly never thought much about her until you walked in here.”

“Well, now you can,” Claudine said. “Think about her, but more about your daughter.”

“Why didn’t anyone contact me?” He looked at me for an answer this time.

“My grandparents were very ashamed,” I said. “I hadn’t seen my mother for fifteen years. She stopped by just recently and told me about you.”

“Not very much,” Claudine added.

“I don’t know what to say. Maybe if I had known . . .”

“You would have paid for an abortion?” Claudine fired at him.

“I wasn’t in love with Debbie Edwards. I don’t know what I would have done. She made the decision herself.”

“No, Elle’s grandparents made the decision. Her mother ran off, and Elle was the only one who ended up doing any suffering at all,” Claudine summed up.

“Look,” my father started to say.

Suddenly, the office door burst open, and two little girls, one who looked nine or ten and the other six or seven, came charging in. Both were wearing cute pink and white blouses and shorts. They had the same shade of hair as my father and me, their hair cut neatly at shoulder length. A tall, beautiful, light-brown-haired woman with soft green eyes followed them. She wore a Kelly-green blouse and a pair of dark blue slacks that hugged her shapely hips and long legs. When she looked at us, she smiled, a small dimple flashing in her left cheek. She was stunning.

My father held out his arms, and both girls ran to give him a hug.

This, I thought, was the man my mother and my grandmother had characterized as an evil, violent rapist?

“Oh, I’m sorry we’re interrupting,” the woman said. She waited obviously for some sort of introduction.

My father looked incapable of speaking.

“We’re the children of parents who attended SUNY Albany and used to hang out at Barrett’s,” Claudine said. “I’m Claudine Spenser. This is my twin brother, Mason, and this is Elle Edwards. We’re up here looking at colleges, and we promised our parents we would stop by to say hello to Mr. Barrett if we had the chance.”

“Oh, that’s so nice. I’m Colleen Barrett,” she said, offering us her hand. “That’s Annie and Suzanne. Annie’s the older. Say hello, girls.”

They both turned to us, still lying against my father for security, and said, “Hello.”

“We’re just off to the club for the afternoon. I wanted to remind you to bring those extra steaks home later, Sean,” she told him, and turned to us. “If you’re all staying, you’re certainly invited. We’re having a barbecue tonight with a few friends. Oh, isn’t Kenny Taylor a graduate of SUNY Albany, Sean?”

“Much later,” he said, “than their parents.”

“Oh. Well . . .”

“We’d love to stay. Thank you for your invitation,” Claudine said. I looked at her sharply. “But we’re on our way home and just stopped by for a quick hello.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, if you attend SUNY or another one of the nearby schools, stop in again. Come on, girls,” she said, holding out her hands. Her daughters kissed my father and then joined her. “Have a safe trip home,” she said. “Where is home?”

“Lake Hurley,” Mason replied quickly.

“Lovely. I think we were there, what, five years ago, Sean?”

I looked at him. He was there? Close to me?

“Yeah, about,” he said.

She smiled at us and left. When she closed the door behind her, it felt as if she had taken all the air out of the office with her for a moment.

“Thanks for that,” my father said.

“We told you we weren’t here to make any demands on you,” Mason said. “We simply thought you should meet.”

He nodded, looking at me. “Have you guys had any lunch yet?”

“No,” Claudine said.

“Why don’t we all just go have lunch here?”

Mason and Claudine looked at me.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Good.”

My father rose. Mason opened the office door. Claudine gave me a smile of satisfaction and followed him.

My father stepped up beside me. “You look a lot like your mother,” he said. “I don’t know what she’s like now, but she was a very pretty girl.”

“She’s still pretty,” I said.

I walked out, and the four of us entered the restaurant. My father directed us to a table and then got three menus and returned.

“My favorite thing we serve for lunch is the Chinese chicken salad,” he told us, “but order whatever you want. We do have great hamburgers, and there’s a turkey burger on the menu.”

“Yeah, I like that,” Mason said.

When the waitress came over, both Claudine and I ordered the Chinese chicken salad, Mason ordered the turkey burger, and we all ordered lemonades.

“It’s freshly made,” my father said. “I made some changes in the restaurant when I took over from my father. I got religion.”

We all looked up at him.

He smiled. “By that, I mean I started eating healthier, exercising. When you get married, have children, you realize pretty quickly that you have a responsibility not only to them but to yourself to be healthy for them. I don’t go around preaching about it,” he added, holding his hand up.

Mason laughed. “I’m on the swim team,” he said. “I usually watch my diet.”

“My grandparents don’t like frozen foods, anything ready-made,” I said. “We eat fresh mostly, too.”

He nodded.

“Her grandmother just had a stroke,” Claudine said.

“Oh? How bad?”

“Bad,” Mason said.

No one spoke for a moment.

“My grandfather’s fine,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

“What grade are you in?” he asked, and I began to tell him my short life story. He was surprised to hear that I would just be starting public school. I described Grandmother Myra’s homeschooling me. I did most of the talking, with Mason only interrupting to tell him about my artistic talents.

“I can’t draw a straight line. You’ve got to be inheriting that from your mother’s side,” my father said.

As we ate and I described in more detail what my life had been like, he grew more and more despondent.

“I do remember now that your mother was unhappy with her parents. She was quite a rebellious girl. In those days, for guys like me, that was pretty exciting.”

“She never told you she was pregnant, then?” Mason wanted him to reiterate.

“Never did. As I told you in the office, she was just gone from my life one day. Maybe she knew we weren’t going to be a steady thing much longer.” He thought a moment. “I could find a way to get you some money,” he told me.

“No. I don’t want you to do that,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him that this visit was a secret, that if he began to send me money or called or even wrote, it would make things even more difficult at home for me.

“Maybe she’ll end up going to one of the colleges around here,” Claudine suggested.

“Yeah, that could be. There’s about ten schools,” he said. “Of course, if that happens . . .”

“I’m not going to bust in on your family,” I told him.

Mason looked at his watch and then pointed to it.

“We’ve got to go,” I said. “I have to be home when my grandfather returns from the hospital today.”

“Sure.”

We all rose.

“I’ll walk you guys out,” he said.

Everyone, every customer and employee, was watching us leave. I wondered just how he was going to explain it. Claudine had given him a good way. She was pretty smart when it came to thinking fast. But then again, I thought, remembering the stories she had told me, she had a lot of experience creating excuses.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know about you,” my father told me when we all stepped out of the restaurant. Mason and Claudine took a few steps away from us. “You’re a beautiful girl, Elle, and you seem pretty bright to me. I’m sure you’ll be all right. If you do get into serious trouble, call me. I’ll find a way to help you.”