Chris grabs my hand and I jump a little in my seat. “Take your time.”
I nod and take a few deep breaths before I open the car door. Chris and Jackie follow and my heart pounds in my ears as I shut the door. He places his hand on my back to guide me forward and I wiggle my fingers and arms, like a fighter about to enter the ring.
“Claire, you’re very pale,” Jackie remarks. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
I nod again as I continue up the concrete driveway, past the box hedges that stand like pillars on each side of the garage door. Walking up the brick-paved path to the front door, I try to imagine that each step is literally making me stronger. It’s much harder to fool our brains into thinking we’re strong than it is to believe we are weak. But if we are taught to see the good in others, we should also try to see the good in ourselves.
I am strong.
I’ve endured the stench and agony of my mother’s death. I’ve battled the loneliness of not having a home. I’ve survived willingly handing over a piece of my soul to two complete strangers after losing the love of my life.
I will survive this.
Chris looks at me as he reaches for the doorbell. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
He presses the doorbell and Jackie links her arm with mine. She winks at me and I finally realize that no matter what happens today, I already have a family.
A woman answers the door, her light-brown penciled eyebrows raised in a question beneath her blonde-streaked hair.
“May I help you?” she asks in a pleasant voice that’s definitely tinged with annoyance at being disturbed at ten in the morning.
Her black yoga pants and baby pink T-shirt hug a youthful body, which betrays her late-forties face.
“We’re here to see Phillip Lungren,” Chris replies, making no attempt to offer our identities because the woman suddenly recognizes him.
“Phil is at work. Are you… you’re not…?”
“I’m his daughter,” I respond for Chris. “Claire… Nixon.”
The woman looks at me and back at Chris then she shakes her head. “Phil didn’t tell me he was related to Chris Knight.”
“He’s not,” I reply, trying not to sound too annoyed. “I’m his daughter. Will he be home soon?”
Her lip curls up then she sighs as she seems to remember her manners. “You’re the one from North Carolina?” she asks as if my father has left a trail of illegitimate children traversing the nation.
“Yes, I’m the one from North Carolina. Raleigh.”
Jackie squeezes my arm tighter. I’m sure it’s a gesture of support, until I look at her face and she appears on the verge of breaking this woman in half. She’s trying to draw on me for support.
“Well, then come on in,” she says, taking a step back to make way for us. “I’m Elsie, Phil’s wife. I’ll call him right now to let him know you’re here. He works less than ten minutes from here.”
She leads us into a living room with black leather sofas and more high-end electronics than I’ve ever seen in a home before. Not even Tristan and his flashy house have this kind of setup.
“Have a seat,” she says, waving at the couches. “Would you like something to drink? I’ve got iced tea, water, juice….” She glances at Chris. “Beer, bourbon, vodka, pretty much any kind of liquor you want.”
Chris grabs my hand as we take a seat and the smell of leather surrounds us as a puff of air explodes from the sofa cushions. “We’re fine, thank you,” he replies.
Elsie disappears into the kitchen, to grab her phone I assume, and Chris whispers in my ear. “Didn’t mean to answer for you about the drink, but I don’t trust this woman not to poison us.”
I laugh softly and Jackie smiles at us. The wistful expression on her face makes me wonder if she’s happy that Chris can make me laugh at a time like this or if she’s nervous. I want to tell her that she has nothing to be nervous about. I’m going to get through this and nothing my father says or does will ever affect my love for her.
Elsie enters the living room and sets her iPhone on the coffee table as she takes a seat on the other sofa. “Phil will be here in about twenty minutes.” Her eyes take everything in, from Chris and I holding hands to the stubborn look on Jackie’s face. “So, you two are a couple?”
“Claire is my heart,” Chris responds and I smile as I get a swooping sensation in my belly.
I never think of Chris as the rock star every one else sees him as. To me, he’s just Chris: the guy who patiently glued the broken pieces of my shattered heart back together. The same guy who cried last night when he discovered I’m carrying his child. It’s always weird when I see others regard him as a celebrity.
Still, as wonderful as that simple statement, Claire is my heart, makes me feel, I know that this is partially a threat from Chris to Elsie: Fuck with her and you’re fucking with my heart.
“Is Nichelle here?” I ask to ease the growing tension in the room.
“No, Nichelle is on Winter Break. She’s out with some friends right now. You know kids that age. If they’re not at the mall or at home, they’re off getting into trouble.” She snatches her phone off the coffee table and begins typing something. “I’ll text her to see if she can come home to meet you.”
The tone in Elsie’s voice sounds annoyed, as if she knows Nichelle will not come home, but she’ll send the text anyway just to satisfy my curiosity.
“That’s not necessary,” I say. “I don’t want to interrupt her plans.”
“Oh, please. She does the same thing every day. You’re not interrupting anything.” Elsie rolls her eyes as Nichelle responds quickly. “She says she can’t come. She’s sitting inside the movie theater right now.”
I guess she’s not as anxious to meet me as I am to meet her. I try not to let this hurt me—she’s just a teenager, after all—but it stings.
Jackie squeezes my knee when she sees the disappointment in my face. “It’s just bad timing.”
I’m not sure why I put myself in a position to be rejected. I guess we never really know if the path we’ve chosen was the wrong one until we reach the end. The important thing is whether you enjoyed the journey. And telling Chris about the letter from my father only brought us closer. If nothing else comes out of this visit, I’ve already won because I have Chris.
After twenty minutes of awkward conversation punctuated by long silences, the sound of the front door opening makes us all perk up. Elsie grabs her phone off the table again and we all stand up as my father walks into the living room.
He’s thin and tall with ropy muscles snaking underneath his tanned skin. His grayish-brown mustache matches the hair on his head. The yellow T-shirt he wears tucked into his jeans has the word Kelly Co splashed across the left side of his chest in green letters.
Kelly Company.
How ironic. The father who abandoned me, and my mother, works at a company with the same name as my mother, and he has to wear her name over his heart every day when he goes to work.
He smiles at me, but it’s such a phony smile that I can’t even bring myself to smile back. “You’re Claire?” he asks with even more phony enthusiasm.
I don’t know what I expected from the person who never attempted to contact me until I refused the trust fund he contributed to. What was I thinking coming here?
Chris reaches out his hand to Phil. “Nice to meet you. I’m Chris.”
They shake and Phil raises one of his eyebrows, as if he’s sizing Chris up, then he laughs. “Great to meet you, Chris.”
He turns to Jackie and she holds out her hand. “I’m Jackie. Claire’s foster mother. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Phil looks a little taken aback by Jackie’s presence. He probably didn’t expect to meet the person who took care of me when he refused to. He turns to me and I take a deep breath as he holds out his hand.
I don’t want to shake his hand. I don’t want to feel the callous built over the years of working a blue-collar job to support his family. I don’t want to feel the warmth that belies the truth of how coldly he abandoned my mother and me.
“Claire has been through a lot,” Jackie says. “I think she deserves to know why you weren’t there for her.”
As soon as she says this, my father’s eyes widen and I realize I don’t need to know why he wasn’t there. I don’t need anything from this man.
“We were young,” he says, glancing back and forth between Chris and me as if we should understand.
Chris shakes his head. He’s just as appalled as I am.
“I should have been there, but I was dumb. Then I got offered a job in Kentucky, and I took it. Then I got offered another job in California…. And by the time your mom contacted me, I had already married Elsie and Nichelle was on the way.”
“You moved on,” I say, summarizing the sorry excuse he just gave me. “Well, while you were busy moving on, my mom was busy dying from a heroine overdose. And I was busy being kicked around from one place to another like a piece of trash. Nobody wants a piece of trash and that’s what I felt like. Because you didn’t want me.”
Jackie watches me with tears in her eyes, but she still smiles as she mouths, “I’m proud of you.”
Phil looks very uncomfortable and a little defensive, like a dog backed into a corner. “Well, I did deposit all that money into your account all these years. I wasn’t a deadbeat or nothing like that.”
“That money is nothing but a reminder of a childhood I want to forget. I don’t want your money. I want my childhood back. I want my mother back.”
My entire body trembles as the adrenaline courses through me. These are the words I’ve dreamed of speaking, but always wished I would never have to. In my happiest dreams, this meeting included a heartfelt apology from my father followed by the kind of hug that heals from the inside out.
Jackie wipes the tears from my face and I wait another couple of minutes for an apology that was never coming to me. “You ready to go, honey?” she whispers and I nod as I let out a deep breath that I think I’ve been holding for twenty-one years.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around to meet your sister?” Jackie asks.
“We have a flight to catch,” I reply. “And she didn’t seem so eager to meet me after all.”
Chris nods toward the door. “Mom, take Claire to the car. I’m going to have a talk with Phil.” I look at Chris questioningly and he shakes his head. “I’ll be right there. You two go ahead.”
“It was nice meeting you,” Elsie says and I nod as Jackie and I walk out of the house arm-in-arm.
It’s raining when we get outside and we quickly deactivate the car alarm so we can both get into the backseat. As soon as the car door closes, Jackie takes me into her arms and I cry on her shoulder for a few minutes as she strokes my hair.
“You said what you needed to say, Claire. If he can’t see what he did wrong then he’s not your father. A father loves his child and would never allow his child to feel unwanted. That is what you deserved and I hope with every bone in my body that I have given you that.”
“You have. You’ve given me so much more than that,” I reply as I think of Chris.
I’m worried about what he’s doing inside that house. But my worrying ends when he walks down the brick path toward us. He slides into the driver’s seat and quickly turns the key in the ignition.
“What happened?” I ask anxiously.
He shakes his head and I can feel the anger pulsing off of him with every breath he takes. “Exactly what I thought was going to happen.” He pulls away from the curb and makes a U-turn to go back the way we came. “I offered him a check in the amount of the trust fund and he took it.”