Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
During the engagement dinner for Sam and Joni, Stevie did her best to keep her spirits up.
Over fancy hors d’oeuvres and fancy glasses of wine and fancy platters of fish, and through boring fancy conversations, Stevie smiled, asked questions, and told herself that it was all for Joni’s future and her love for Sam.
Stevie would do anything for her daughter.
She’d even learn to love these heinous, wealthy people—people who, she knew, were not entirely unlike Joni’s father’s family.
This was nothing Joni knew. But it felt like a bit of irony that only Stevie could hold.
Throughout the wedding preparations, Stevie told Joni to put her to work. “I’ll do whatever you need. I’ll fold invitations. I’ll call the caterers. I’m here.”
But Joni told Stevie that everything was taken care of. “Sam’s family has a vision for the wedding. His mother knows everyone there is to know in the wedding business. They told me to sit back, relax, and lose ten pounds. Ha.”
Over the phone, Stevie hardly recognized her daughter’s voice. It echoed with something like sorrow and something like pretentiousness. When she hung up, tears filled her eyes, but she swallowed down her grief, got in her car, and went to work. Health insurance wouldn’t sell itself.
A few weeks before the wedding, Joni called Stevie again to ask whether she was planning to bring a plus-one.
Yet again, Stevie was caught off guard. If she’d had someone to bring, wouldn’t her daughter know about him?
Wouldn’t she have called Joni to gush about how in love she was?
A previous version of Stevie and Joni would have talked about every element of the man’s character, about what he’d said on the date, about whether or not Stevie was willing to change her entire life for him.
Stevie couldn’t help but see the phone call as proof that Joni didn’t want to know anything about Stevie’s life, not if she could help it.
With all this running wild in Stevie’s mind, she said, “I’m coming alone.”
“Great,” Joni said. “Talk soon.”
On the morning of Joni’s wedding, Stevie sat in the bridal suite and watched her daughter and her daughter’s new glitzy friends get ready.
Makeup artists and hairstylists filled the space, cracking jokes and gossiping.
Everyone gushed that Joni was “the most beautiful bride,” although, in Stevie’s opinion, Joni looked overdone and unlike herself.
A makeup artist tried to attack Stevie’s face with a lipliner, and Stevie had to fight her off.
She’d done her makeup at home. She wanted to feel like herself.
Watching the wedding was a little like watching a celebrity wedding on television.
Stevie stood where she was supposed to stand and sat where she was supposed to sit.
She listened as her daughter said her vows and clapped when she kissed her groom.
But with each passing moment, Stevie felt the cracks in her heart deepen.
She felt the bonds to her daughter breaking.
At the reception, a few people approached Stevie and asked her about her connection to the bride or groom.
Apparently, she was a mystery to everyone there.
When she said she was the mother of the bride, they looked surprised, shocked, and asked her immediately what she did for a living.
Stevie resented this question. Maybe she resented it because she’d wanted to do music for a living and was about as far from music as she’d ever been.
Or perhaps she resented it because it felt so soulless and empty. Regardless, her head spun.
“I sell insurance,” she told them.
Their eyes were empty. “Oh. How fascinating. Tell me, what’s that like?”
“It’s a little like selling anything else,” Stevie told them.
“Oh! I can’t pretend to know what that’s like,” they said, laughing because they’d never had to put their lives on the line. They didn’t know what it meant to be broke.
After the wedding, Stevie didn’t hear from her daughter for more than two weeks.
Stevie knew she and Sam were on their honeymoon on some island she’d never heard of in some ocean far away, and she didn’t know how to contact her.
At work, she practiced thinking, I don’t have a daughter.
I don’t have a family. She wanted to be able to sit with this comfortably.
She wanted to be able to reckon with her own future.
But when Joni returned from her honeymoon, she called Stevie and asked if she wanted to go to lunch.
Stevie felt a crush of love for her daughter and agreed right away.
She left work at eleven thirty with no plans to return till one thirty at the earliest. If they asked her what had taken her so long, she resolved to quit. She hated it anyway.
Joni and Stevie met at a quaint brunch spot in Echo Park, not far from the lake.
Joni arrived a few minutes after Stevie, making a grand entrance, her white dress flowing out behind her sculpted, tanned legs.
Stevie had never had the money to make herself so beautiful.
She hardly knew what Pilates was. She stood to welcome her daughter with a hug and tell her how gorgeous she looked.
“Thanks, Mom.” Joni smiled nervously and sat down, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Stevie knew something was wrong right away. But she played the part at first, asking questions about the honeymoon and how Joni was feeling now that the wedding was over. “Relieved but sad,” Joni said. “But mostly relieved.” She laughed.
Stevie could hardly touch her sandwich. She was terrified of why Joni had brought her here and what Joni planned to tell her. She could feel it, dangling over her, like a sword about to fall. She bit her tongue to keep from demanding that Joni tell her right away.
“Listen, Mom,” Joni said, wadding up a napkin in her fist, “I wanted to tell you. Sam and I are going to try for a baby soon.”
Stevie’s heart nearly exploded. Is this what she wants to tell me? Is this why she’s so nervous?
“Honey, that’s fantastic!” she said. “You’ll be a wonderful mother.”
Joni bit her lower lip. It was like she couldn’t look up at Stevie any longer. “I hope so. I’m nervous. I mean, I know how rough motherhood was on you. Being single. And, you know, I was talking to Sam, and we were really curious about my dad.”
Stevie felt like she had stones in her stomach. She leaned back in her chair, gaping at Joni. “I’ve told you that he was never a part of my life,” she said.
“Right. I know that. I know what you’ve told me,” Joni said. “But Sam’s wondering if maybe that’s not the entire story? I mean, I know you’ve told me what you want to tell me. But we want to know more. I want to know more. Especially as we move into this new role as parents.”
Stevie thought she was going to throw up. It was clear that Sam had corrupted Stevie, that he’d told her that her relationship with her mother wasn’t enough. Maybe he’d told Joni that her mother had been lying to her and couldn’t be trusted.
“Your father was never even really my boyfriend,” Stevie explained. “We met in New York and hung out for a few months. Then one day, he was gone. I have no way of getting in touch with him.”
More than that, Stevie would be mortified to contact him.
He’d left her in a lurch, pregnant and in love with him.
Of course, she hadn’t let him know that she was pregnant.
She hadn’t let him know that she was in love with him.
She hadn’t told him so much. He’d thought she was a fun-loving twenty-year-old musician.
He’d thought she was entirely different from any person in his wealthy universe.
By the end of lunch, it was clear to Joni that Stevie didn’t plan to tell her the identity of her father, not yet.
But Stevie knew that Joni had no plans to give up.
She wasn’t sure what was possible in the world of the very wealthy.
Maybe Joni was going to get a DNA test and figure out his identity herself?
Perhaps she was going to bond with her father and her other family, leaving Stevie abandoned?
Stevie hugged her daughter goodbye and felt her stiff in her arms. “Honey, please understand. It was only ever us, remember? We were all each other needed. In my mind, you never had a dad.”
But Joni was reticent. She said goodbye and left Stevie on the sidewalk in front of the brunch spot, racing down the road to her car. Stevie began to shake. She called work and told them that she’d gotten food poisoning at lunch and couldn’t come in.
For more than a month, Stevie didn’t hear from Joni.
She threw herself into work, reading, and watching bad television shows with many seasons.
She had never been lonelier in her life.
Sometimes she looked at photographs from Joni’s wedding, at images of herself and her daughter in fancy dresses, and marveled that it had really happened.
Her memories of it were fluttering away.
And then one day, Joni called her and told her she was pregnant. “I figured you’d want to know,” she said.
Stevie burst into tears of joy. “Honey, that’s fantastic! Oh, I’m so happy for you!”
At this, Joni melted the slightest bit. “We’re happy. We’re thrilled. Oh, Mom.” She let out a sob. “Mom, I don’t know what to say.”
Joni drove to Stevie’s apartment, where Stevie made her a grilled cheese sandwich, just as she used to, and demanded Joni tell her everything.
Joni described her emotions, her fear, and her visions for the future.
She ate a full grilled cheese and then asked for another, which Stevie happily supplied.
She hadn’t seen her daughter so ravenous since she’d met Sam.
She wished she could tell her daughter how little she liked Sam and how she saw Sam as a wedge between them.
But she didn’t want to push her further away.
Two weeks after that beautiful day of grilled cheeses, Joni called with news.
She’d miscarried. Her voice was dead. There were no tears.
Stevie asked if she wanted to come over or if Stevie should come by, but Joni said no.
She wanted to be alone. Stevie sat at the edge of her bed and stared at the wall for a full hour, then reminded herself that miscarriages happened all the time.
They were typical and not proof that anyone was unhealthy.
She texted her daughter to say she loved her, and Joni didn’t text back.
Over the next few months, Joni miscarried again and again. A few times, Joni called to say she was pregnant, and they recreated the joy they’d once felt. But mostly, Joni now called to say, “It happened again,” and insinuated that she still wanted to know her father's identity.
“I’ve been thinking about him more and more,” Joni said over the phone one afternoon.
It was raining outside, buckets of rain, more rain than they’d ever gotten in Los Angeles.
“With each miscarriage, it boggles my mind that we’ve been living separate lives all this time.
Life is precious, Mom. I want to contact him. I want to know him.”
Stevie was frightened. She felt no closer to revealing the identity of Joni’s father than she had when all this began. Feeling alone, she confessed her problems to one of her coworkers, who blinked at her, confused, and asked, “You never told him you were pregnant?”
“It was complicated,” she explained. But she never dug deeper into the story behind Joni, behind the greatest love she’d ever known. She didn’t feel she owed it to anyone.
Maybe she was wrong.
When Joni’s pregnancy finally stuck, Stevie prayed nightly that everything would go as planned.
She visualized herself holding Joni’s baby.
She envisioned Joni and Joni’s baby with her in the sunshine, on the beach, watching the ocean sweep across the sands.
She imagined Joni growing her family, dropping the grandkids off at Stevie’s when she went to Pilates or yoga or whatever it was she did. Stevie’s heart swelled with excitement.
But when the baby was born, Joni contacted Stevie exactly once.
“She’s here,” she said. Her voice was resigned.
Stevie was at home, washing dishes. She stood at the sink, tears racing down her cheeks. “How are you? How is she?” she demanded. She was ready to leap into the car and head over there. She could be holding her granddaughter in an hour, tops.
“We’re okay,” Joni said. “We’re healthy.”
“Oh, what a relief!” Stevie cried. She’d known that her daughter was due any moment.
She’d wanted Joni to call when she was going to the hospital, but she’d also known that Joni probably wouldn’t.
“I can be there soon. Can I pick up anything for you? Food? Chinese?” Joni loved Chinese food more than anyone in the world.
“Nothing, Mom. No.” Joni cleared her throat. She sounded exhausted. She probably was. “Mom, I called to tell you that Sam and I have decided we don’t want you to meet the baby just yet.”
Stevie felt as though she was going to fall over. “I’m sorry? I’m sorry?” She felt like a fool. She reached for the kitchen chair and sat down. Maybe she’d misheard?
“You know, we think it’s really dishonest that you won’t tell me my father’s identity,” Joni continued. “We sort of understand your reasoning, I guess, but we really don’t like it. We need honest people in our daughter’s life. We need to start from a place of healing and love.”
Stevie gasped for breath. “Honey, I don’t know what you think, but your father, he isn’t…” He isn’t who you think he is. He isn’t going to offer you anything. He isn’t. He isn’t.
But before Stevie could muster a response, Joni had told her she had to go and hung up the phone. Stevie sat, sweating with panic, and tried to call her back. But Joni had blocked her number. Her daughter had built a wall between them, one that Stevie wasn’t sure she could ever climb.