CHAPTER TWO #2
Her mom turned more toward Rube, as if she was being interviewed by him and not her own daughter. “I did not know about you, Rube. I mean, when your partner suddenly leaves you and your child with a working farm and very little savings, you look back less favorably on a person’s actions, yes? And so I began to suspect that maybe Chuck had not been entirely honest with me. But I did not know anything about a previous family.”
“Oh,”
Rube said, clearly disappointed, as if he’d hoped that his father, in a moment of weakness, had confessed to his current wife and child that he actually, in hindsight, missed his previous wife and child and—oh, by the way—he had a previous wife and child, and, also, they were so great, just lovely people.
“But,”
Mad’s mom continued, “I did know he started a new family.”
“Wait, what?”
Mad shouted, unable to control herself. “You knew? When?”
“Well, honey, now, calm down. When your dad left us, you were still a kid. And so, obviously, I couldn’t just let him run off and leave us without making sure that he didn’t want to come back and, you know, try again. And so for about a year I searched for him in roundabout ways. And then, finally, I got an envelope of money, and it had a phone number written on a notecard and it said to call at a certain day and time, and so I called, and it was a pay phone and your father answered and said that he was sorry, but he was starting over, needed to start over in order to be better this time around. I had no idea what he meant by that. He hadn’t been bad to us. But, anyway, he had met a new woman and was starting a family. And that he wouldn’t be able to see me again, though, because he had to leave the past in the past.”
“He sent you money?”
Rube asked, leaning forward, his satchel nearly falling to the floor. “Did he ever call you again?”
“Oh, a few times, but years would go by. Sometimes he’d call on my birthday, but he wouldn’t tell me much. We wouldn’t talk, really. He’d say, ‘Happy birthday, Rach,’ and I’d thank him and then he’d hang up. I didn’t know about his life and he didn’t ask about mine. I think he just wanted me to know he was somewhere in the world. And I didn’t mind that, honestly.”
“I can’t believe this,”
Mad said. “You never told me.”
“Honey, it was better for you, at that age, to think he was just gone, had disappeared, like he’d been abducted by a UFO or—”
“I honestly considered that!”
Mad yelled. “And I was worried that the aliens were going to come back for us. I thought he’d been killed by some weird hillbilly mafia. I mean, I thought a thousand different things and it maybe would have been nice to know that he was just walking across the continental United States like Johnny Appleseed or something.”
“I didn’t want you to think less of your father.”
“How could I have thought less of him? He left us. That’s the least I could think of him.”
It was quiet for a moment as Mad watched her mother try to think of something to say that would make it hurt less. But Mad figured the pain was already here, making itself known in her heart, and so she pushed on.
“Did he ask about me? Did he ever once ask to talk to me ?”
Mad’s mother considered her for a moment and then shook her head. What hurt worse, Mad wondered, to be left behind, or to never be thought of after? It hurt the same, she decided. It hurt exactly the same.
“I feel like maybe I should go. Not leave, actually,”
Rube offered. “But, like, is there a separate sitting room where I could go if you two wanted to talk about this more?”
“No,”
Mad said, “that’s it. Like, what else can I say? Everyone knows everything about my dad and all the shit he did except for me.”
“We all have little pieces,”
Rube offered. “We have these small parts of him, and so that’s why I came. I’m trying to fit them all together. Not just for me, but for all of us.”
“So you’re just on a fact-finding mission to create an oral history that explains the actions of our dad? You’re going to each family and kind of upsetting the order of their lives?”
“I mean, that’s certainly a way to put it,”
Rube said, kind of smiling in embarrassment. “Family history is important, right? I have a sister! It’s all kind of incredible and I’m just trying to figure it out.”
Mad almost said “half sister,”
but she knew it wouldn’t help anything.
“I have no idea how you and I are connected,”
Rube said to Mad’s mother.
“Oh, I don’t think we’re anything.”
“My mom died,”
Rube said suddenly.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“So I mean, I don’t know if it’s legal or anything, but maybe you would be like my stepmother, once removed?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t think it works like that.”
“No, I know. But we’re connected, obviously.”
“Sure, why not?”
she offered.
Mad tried to think of a pop culture equivalent that would explain it. It was like The Brady Bunch if the dad had kept running off and his kids refused to let him start a new family without them. It was like Gilligan’s Island if the island was everyone’s dad. It was like The Parent Trap if the twins were so damn stupid that they couldn’t even find the dad to get the families back together.
“So, Reuben, tell me, are you tracking down Chuck? Are you searching for him? Or just going to the affected parties and letting them know what’s going on?”
her mother asked, like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if the last time a stranger was in this house for this long wasn’t at least two years ago. She was talking to Rube as if he was a child who had built a time machine and she was letting him believe it was real for as long as possible before he was sorely disappointed.
“Probably doing both,”
he answered. “I hired a private investigator”—he turned to Mad—“Which is what I was going to tell you, and she has compiled a pretty detailed dossier of leads and biographical information and public evidence of our dad’s existence over the years. It’s called skip tracing, and it’s usually to track down people who owe tons of money or have broken the law. They ‘skip town’ and are on the run. It can be easy or difficult based on how much the person wanted to disappear.”
“Was Dad easy or hard?”
Mad asked.
“Pretty hard,”
Rube admitted. “He kind of shifted his name and early on forged some documents to get new IDs without altering too much. But then he’d go back to his regular identity and Social Security, so it got a little complicated. But this detective, she’s great. Her name is Evalynn Mann. Evalynn Mann, PI. Warner Brothers is actually making a movie about her because she found this millionaire’s missing dog and, in the process, broke up this huge international art theft ring.”
“Oh, I think I heard something about that,”
Mad’s mother said.
“Well, the issue is that she’s kind of stopped helping me. I think maybe the Hollywood stuff might be distracting her from her cases, because I can’t get her to reply to my emails or return my phone calls. She has this assistant who says that her role as an executive producer and on-set consultant has made it very hard for her to continue her caseload. But I found you! So it’s pretty solid so far.”
Mad’s mother nodded.
“But no matter what happens, I wanted to meet my brothers and sisters.”
“So okay,”
Mad interrupted, “but how many are there? Three? Six? Thirty? A hundred?”
“Oh, well, from the information that I have, there are four of us. There’s another girl, she’s in college in Oklahoma, and then a boy, and he’s eleven, lives in Utah. There may be more. Evalynn was supposed to keep working on it, but again, I don’t think I’m going to hear more from her. And our dad’s in California now, if you can believe it. But I can’t imagine there are more than that. He’s pretty old now.”
He turned to Mad’s mom. “No offense.”
“He’s older than me,”
she replied.
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, god,”
Mad said. But it was a manageable number. It was in the realm of possibility to accept three half siblings into her life. It was nice to know that it wasn’t a hundred. A hundred kids? Thanksgiving? It would have been a nightmare.
“My mom died, I think I told you,”
Rube continued, “and it was difficult, not a good death, or I guess worse than even regular death would be. And I feel lonely? I feel like I missed out on something by not having a family, or not having as much of the family as I found out that I had. So I’m trying to meet them, to hopefully stay in touch.”
He looked at Mad, who blushed, felt so embarrassed by his outward emotion, how badly he wanted this.
“And,”
he continued, “I was hoping that Mad would come with me.”
“In the PT Cruiser?”
Mad asked, her voice cracking, like this was the most absurd part of the situation. “You and me in the PT Cruiser chasing down our father?”
“Yes,”
he replied. “We’ll re-create the migration of our father as he moved westward to start new chapters of his life, and we’ll meet the children he left behind, and we’ll, you know, get to know each other.”
“I can’t do that,”
she said. She was only now beginning to recover from the shock of Rube appearing in her life. For that to continue to work, she needed him to leave so she could keep processing it in her own way, in private, as she collected eggs and drove the tractor and waited for possibly more half siblings to suddenly show up in a retro-styled automobile. “I’m not going with you.”
“Please?”
he asked, so openly begging, with such desperation on his face. “I can’t even explain how hard this was. I drove past your farm for an hour, back and forth, and just was not able to turn onto your road. I kept turning around in the driveway of some trailer a ways off until a lady ran out with a handgun and said she had called the cops, and so I finally came to see you. I can’t do that again on my own. I had hoped we’d be able to do it together.”
“And then when we meet the next kid? We just ask them to jump in the PT Cruiser and head to the next town?”
“Well, they might not want to go! You don’t seem that eager. I was thinking it would just be me and you, but, sure, I’ll give them the option.”
“You said the boy was eleven? We can’t kidnap him!”
“I just want to meet them. The rest is up to them. I guess, depending on luggage and each person’s need for their own space, we might have to rent a bigger vehicle at some point,”
Rube admitted. “You are weirdly hung up on the car, which I didn’t request, by the way. It’s what the company had at the tier I chose.”
“I can’t do it.”
“How do you even know?”
he asked.
“Look at me.
I’m doing it.
I mean, yeah, driving through the mid-Atlantic states, I started to have second thoughts and I had a little freakout at a rest stop, but here I am.
And you seem to be a lot more capable than me.”
Mad looked to her mother for confirmation that this was insane, but her mother had an expression that was hard to fully explain, except to say that it looked like the expression of someone who was going to tell you that this insane thing did not sound insane.
Before her mother could even speak, Mad walked out of the room, taking deep breaths, leaving the two of them in the living room while she stepped into the kitchen and ran to the refrigerator and opened the door, putting her face inside the cool space, trying to calm herself.
She noticed a jar of kimchi that she’d bought from some old mountain man at a farmers’ market and figured that it had been at least two years ago.
Why did she still have that unopened jar of kimchi in the fridge?
What was she keeping it for? She hadn’t eaten it because the man, right after she bought it, said that if she had heard that his mason jars weren’t sanitary, that was an old rival of his and that there was absolutely no truth to those unfounded accusations.
But surely she should have thrown it away? Or maybe she was going to hold on to it until the Apocalypse.
She and her mother would ride out the end of the world here, just the two of them, and when every single chicken and egg was gone, when the cheese had molded beyond being edible, when they were so weak with hunger that they knew it was the end of their days, they would unseal this jar of kimchi and eat it and immediately pass on to whatever came after this li—
“Honey?”
her mother said, having suddenly appeared behind her. Mad cursed and hit her head so hard on the door of the fridge that she saw stars.
“Oh, my god, I’m sorry, honey,”
her mother continued, awkwardly hopping around Mad, who was still muttering curses. “I had been standing there for a while and the fridge was just open for so long , and I finally just couldn’t take it.”
“I was just … thinking about stuff.”
“Yes, honey, I bet,”
her mother offered, and of course she would assume that it pertained to her new brother and her not-dead father and her dozens and dozens of possible siblings and stepmothers, once removed. And Mad did not know how to explain that she was thinking about the end of the world, and their inevitable deaths, and why we hold on to some things and not others.
“I’m thinking about my new brother and dad and all that other stuff,” Mad lied.
“I think you should go with him, Madeline,”
her mother said. “He’s your brother, and how else will you get to understand all of this? Wouldn’t it be better to do it with someone who has just as much to gain and to lose as you do?”
“I don’t know him,”
Mad reminded her. “I don’t even know if I want to see Dad.”
“You don’t have to!”
her mother said, as if she’d just thought of it. “You can drop out at some point during the trip if it gets to be too much. You can get on a plane and come back here. But this poor boy, he’s lost his mom. He lost his dad a long time ago, like you. But he doesn’t have anyone else.”
“What about the farm?”
Mad offered. “How are you gonna get along without me?”
“Not well!”
her mother admitted. “But I’ll ask Tracy and Beth and I can get Kimmer’s son to help, because he’s been asking to do it for a while.”
“I think you need more than three people to replace me,” Mad said.
“I could never replace you,”
her mother said, and it made Mad want to cry, the relief of knowing how much one of her parents had loved her. “Just think about it,”
her mother said. “Rube says he has a hotel for the night, and he can give you time to think about it.”
As if conjured by magic, Rube appeared in the doorway. “Hey, I’m not eavesdropping, but I’m just saying I should probably get going. I feel like maybe I tried to accomplish too much today, and I apologize for that.”
“You came just when we said your name,” Mad said.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping, but people are attuned to the sound of their own name, even if everything else sounds like static, so I thought, okay, this is my cue.”
“Have you eaten?”
her mom asked, just as Mad was about to say, “’BYE, RUBE.”
“I have not,”
he admitted. “I was too nervous to even have breakfast. I’m starving, honestly.”
“We should have had lunch by now,”
her mother said, “so let’s eat and then you can head back to your hotel.”
“Let me make it!”
Rube said. He looked so excited. “I know your farm is famous for your eggs, and I have a kind of specialty with eggs. Shirred eggs! With bacon!”
“Is that a New England thing?”
Mad asked.
“Maybe,”
he admitted. “I think it might be French? But this was a Sunday brunch kind of thing that my mom and I made pretty often.”
“Did Dad make them?”
“God, no, Dad never cooked, or not that I remembered.
He wasn’t overly fond of food, honestly.
He ate toast and cereal for breakfast and a ham sandwich for lunch pretty much every single day.
A lobster roll as an extravagance on vacation or something.”
Mad’s father, who was, yes, Rube’s father in another life, had loved food.