16. Jonny
Chapter sixteen
Jonny
Of all the people in the world who could have witnessed Krista Chambers taking me apart like a cheap watch, it had to be Lance Broussard.
I’ve been replaying it since I got home.
Every version is worse. I swore in public.
I told off a woman who was, if insensitive, probably not ill-meaning.
I weaponized the death of my family to shut down a woman who was.
I called the love of my—I called someone I used to know a clown.
And when Lance put his hand on my shoulder and tried to help, I told him to fuck off in a parking lot while holding a bag of catfish.
The worst part isn’t any of that. The worst part is that when he said hush puppies, my body knew him before my brain caught up. After a decade and ten thousand miles, it still knew the sound of him.
I push it down. I’m good at pushing things down. I’ve had practice.
I sit at my desk and open my laptop. There’s editing to do. I’ve been thinking about an outtake reel, and I have decent unused footage from Andhra Pradesh. But when my email loads, one subject line stops me.
From Alice Cadwalader
Subject: Following up on our conversation.
I click on it.
Dear Jonny,
It was so good to meet you this evening, and I hope you’ll forgive me for staring. It’s been bothering me ever since.
I don’t want to put a name in an email. I have been wrong before, and I would rather be wrong to your face than in writing.
But I knew your mother a little, in the years before you were born.
There was a man who came to that house. I only saw him three or four times.
I remember thinking he didn’t belong on our street.
I have spent this evening trying to talk myself out of it. I can’t. You have his jaw and his brow and the way he holds his head when he is listening, and I have seen that face around this town for thirty years.
It’s entirely up to you. I understand if you’d rather let this rest. But I felt I owed it to you to ask, and I would rather say it to you at the boathouse on Tuesday than have you find it somewhere else.
Best, Alice
My father.
I stare at the screen. My mother told me she had IVF. I never questioned it. There was no man in the house, no name on a form, no photograph. My birth certificate says FATHER: UNKNOWN, which I always took as confirmation.
But Alice said I reminded her of someone. Not from Denning Court. “From somewhere else entirely.” She was looking at my face—at the bones of it—like she was reading a map.
The idea that I have a father, somewhere, is staggering. Does he know about me? Has he always known? Did he choose not to be there, or did my mother shut him out the way she shut out everyone?
And then the thought: what if I have siblings?
I lost my entire family in one afternoon. My mother, my brother, my grandmother. Every person on earth who shared my blood. And now this woman is telling me there might be someone else. Someone connected to me by biology, if nothing else. The pull of that is so strong it frightens me.
I close the laptop and sit with it. I need to think.
The front door clicks. “Jonny!” Aunt Shelley calls. “Sorry, things ran later than I thought.” She knocks on my door and peers in. “How was your day, honey?”
“Eventful,” I say. “I’ll tell you over dinner.”
We set the table together. I dole out Captain Eddie’s—the catfish I pretty much started a war over—and Aunt Shelley pours white wine into the Waterford crystal, because cheap takeout obviously demands the good glasses.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?”
“Certainly not,” she says, in the voice she uses when she is. “I don’t see why you insist on going with me. I’ve been going to doctor’s appointments alone since I was old enough to drive.”
“Good. Then you can drive me, because my driver’s license technically expired while I was in India.
I want to go, Aunt Shelley. I missed you.
So, it would make me feel better to know that, if I don’t get the nephew of the year award, that at least Santa’s going to give me a lump of coal this Christmas. ”
“Are you staying for Christmas?”
I hadn’t thought that far yet, and I must have made a face, because she changes the subject to talk about the behind-the-scene dramas in the higher echelons of University administration.
After that, we eat in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
She asks about my editing, and I tell her about the outtake reel.
She tells me about a faculty meeting that devolved into a shouting match over parking allocations.
“Aunt Shelley,” I say, when the plates are mostly empty. “Do you know someone named Alice Cadwalader?”
She considers the name. “I might have seen it in an email or two over the years, but I don’t think I’ve spoken to her. Why?”
“I met her at the Phoenix Society. She used to live on Denning Court, down the end of the cul-de-sac.” I take a sip of wine. “She said I reminded her of someone. And then she wouldn’t say another word about it. She emailed me tonight. She thinks she might know who my father is.”
Aunt Shelley puts down her fork.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. Mom told me it was IVF. Was that true?”
She picks up her wine glass, takes a careful sip, and sets it back down. “Seriously?” She sounds genuinely surprised. She waits for me to say I’m joking. I don’t.
“So there was a man.”
“There normally is.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. I never met him. Your mother and I were already on thin ice by then. I was trying to keep things civil enough that I could still see your grandmother from time to time, but that ship had pretty much sailed.” She turns the glass on the table.
“All I know is that at the end, Angela was bitter. But breakups are like that. People say things about each other that aren’t always the whole truth. ”
“You never asked who he was?”
“I tried. She shut it down. And I had to weigh pushing for answers against losing access to you and your grandmother entirely. And then I did, anyway, because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. So I let it go.” She looks at me steadily. “I’m sorry. I should have tried harder.”
“You did your best,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I’d spent my whole life avoiding responsibilities.
I never married, never wanted kids. When you came to me, I thought—if I’m his friend, if I give him the freedoms his mother never did, we’ll be fine.
” She pauses. “I didn’t realize you were still a child who needed someone to step in and be the adult.
To guide you. Not just hand you the keys and say go. ”
“If it helps, I think the keys were exactly what I needed.”
“Maybe. But if I’d known how to be there for you properly, you might not have fled halfway around the world to find yourself.”
“You did great, Aunt Shelley. It was a tough situation with no rule book. And I did find myself, so it’s fine.”
She smiles, but it’s the kind of smile that has grief behind it. “You’re made of tough stuff, Parker Jonathan Bishop. But that doesn’t mean you should have had to be.”
We’re quiet for a moment.
“What do you think I should do?” I ask. “About Alice.”
“I think you should meet her. If there’s a chance you have family out there—real, living family—you deserve to know.”
I nod. She’s right, and I knew she would say that. It’s what I would say to anyone else.
“There was a run-in. At Captain Eddie’s, of all places.
This girl insisted we’d gone to high school together, so therefore we should be best friends.
I know she didn’t mean harm, but it was humiliating.
I don’t even know why. It was like she saw Parker Bishop, Fire Orphan, and the more I pushed back the more she dug in, and at the end I just exploded.
And Lance was there, which made it worse. It was like a bad dream.”
Aunt Shelley sets her glass down. “Did she ask you a single question about your life?”
I think about it. “She asked if I was a flight attendant.”
“Mm.”
“She said we should get together. Girls night. She was going to call Deedee and Tamara.” I turn my fork over. “She said the names like I’d know them. I didn’t. I’ve never heard of either of them.”
“Of course you haven’t.” She says it gently. “Honey, she wasn’t reconnecting. There was nothing there to reconnect. She was collecting you.”
“That’s a bit much.”
“Girls night. In front of a room full of strangers, on the day she meets you, before you’d finished paying.” She picks the glass back up. “You’d make a very good story for her. Left town, came back, foreign, famous, gay. And the fire on top of it.”
“She was being friendly.”
“She was being friendly,” she agrees. “That’s what makes it impossible to object to.
You can’t fight somebody who’s smiling at you.
You only end up looking like the one with the problem.
” She turns the stem of the glass. “She might not have thought she meant harm. But she did mean to diminish you.” She looks up.
“And you were right to be pissed off about it.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
“Oh.” I put my fork down. “I feel like I understand people so well when I’m in India and can’t speak their language. Then I come here and they’re a complete mystery to me.”
“It’s easy to understand strangers. The ones who think they have a claim on you, they’re always harder than you think to unravel.”
“And what about the ones who really do have a claim on you?”
“You don’t unravel them. You just let them stay messy. And you learn to love the mess anyway.” She raises her glass. “To messy people.”
“She called me Parker,” I say. “Twice. In front of everybody. Like it was hers to use.” My voice has gone thin. “I told her I go by Jonny now and she just carried on. Nine years, and one woman at a counter can put me right back.”
“You are Parker Bishop, honey,” she says, reading my face.
“I know you don’t like to hear that, but you’re Parker Bishop deep inside, and he’s a good, sweet man.
There was never anything wrong with Parker.
” Her eyes twinkle. “But if you want to be tall, dark, and mysterious, nobody’s stopping you.
But, let’s go back to the other thing. Lance Broussard. ”
“At Captain Eddie’s. Yes. That went so badly. I might owe him an apology. Whether or not he would be willing to accept it is another story.”
“Well, you’ll probably get the opportunity to. He lives across the street.”
Involuntarily, I snap my attention to the bank of windows in the living room, like I expect Lance Broussard to be sitting down to dinner just across from us.
“He’s on the fifth floor.”
I can’t see that far up from this vantage point, so I look back at her. “Oh wow. Wait. How do you know where he lived?”
“He came here this afternoon,” she says.
“He what?”
“About three o’clock. You must have just missed him. In fact, when he knocked on the door, I thought that you might have come back because you forgot something.” She runs her finger over the crystal. It produces a high, clear note. “He asked after you, by the way. Asked me to remember him to you.”
“Did you tell him I’m here?”
“I wanted to. But we didn’t talk about that first. I didn’t expect to see him at my front door. So I didn’t.”
“Thank you.”
After dinner, I wash the Waterford by hand and she dries. When we’re done, she squeezes my arm and says goodnight. But at my door, she turns back.
“Jonny.”
“Yeah?”
She crosses back to me and takes my left hand in both of hers.
She turns it over, gently, and her thumb finds the inside of my wrist. The thin, pale scars that run along the tendon.
She doesn’t look at them. She doesn’t need to.
She traces them once, very lightly, the way you’d touch something you were afraid of breaking.
“You have to love every second of it,” she says. “Even the unlovable parts.”
She lets go of my hand and walks to her room. The door clicks shut.
Tomorrow at nine she finds out whether they got all of it. She won’t let me come in with her.
I sit down at the desk. I open the laptop and start typing.
Dear Alice,
can you please tell me who you think my father is?
Too blunt. I clear it.
Dear Alice, I have so many questions, starting with…
And where does he start? I take that out too.
Dear Alice,
Thank you for writing. I have a great many questions and I don’t know where to begin with any of them.
Tuesday, then. The boathouse.
With kind regards, Jonny (Bishop)
I send it before I can think about it anymore. Then I sit in the dark of my aunt’s spare room and wonder what I have just asked for.
The streetlamps are on along Flint Street. I get up and go to the living room window. I stand where I can see the building across the road, and count up.
Fifth floor. There’s a light on.
I watch it for a long time. It doesn’t go out.