Chapter 16 Birdie #2
I don’t bother drying my hair and throw it up into a messy bun.
While I’m grabbing clean clothes, Crow is on his phone.
He’s looking angrier and angrier, so I come around and grab him by the waist. He drops his head and jams his phone into his pocket.
The warmth from our morning has faded fast, and he turns and plants a kiss on my head.
“Gotta run,” he says, his voice tight. “See you at work?”
After what we just shared, I want him to tell me everything. Open up about the sudden shift in his mood. Whatever he’s reading on his phone has to be what’s caused this sudden change, but I don’t know how to push him, whether to.
“Hey,” I say gently, stroking the side of his face with a hand. “Are you okay?”
For a moment, he focuses his full attention on me.
He leans down and sweeps a kiss across my lips.
“Never better,” he says, and I believe that he means it.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a mask shielding me from what’s going on behind his eyes.
He holds me close and says again, “See you at work.”
I head into the kitchen to get lunch and snacks ready to bring for both myself and Mia for after school, when there’s a knock at the door. Crow just left, so I assume it’s him and open the door to find another man at my door.
“Bridget.” The elderly man nods. “I’m glad you opened the door.”
I look the man over. from the steel-gray eyes that match mine to the stooped-over shoulders, all the way down to the pricey leather loafers on his feet.
“I told you I had no interest in this.” I wave a hand at him. “I don’t need to see you or speak to you. Now, if you don’t mind…” I try to close the door, but he holds up a hand.
“Bridget, please,” he says. “I only need a few minutes. And then I promise, I’ll go.”
He seems a lot less frail than he did the other day. The sun is shining on my face, and I pull my phone from the pocket of my jeans and check the time.
“I need to leave for work,” I tell him. “This isn’t a good time.”
“I’m dying,” he says, his voice low. “This may be the last chance I have to set things right.”
I look him over closely, refusing to believe anything he says as truth. “Don’t lie to me, James. Not now. Not like this.”
There’s something in his face that strikes me. It’s raw and real, but it’s not honesty. It’s fear.
I debate stepping outside to talk to this stranger, to this man who somehow thinks he has a right to contact me, but he looks so pathetic, I decide to let him in.
I step back and wave at my couch, offering him a seat. “Ten minutes,” I remind him, glaring.
He drops down onto my couch, staring at the pictures of my mom and Mia scattered throughout the place. “You have a daughter,” he says quietly.
I nod. I don’t say anything, won’t tell him her name or any details. He lost the right to that information when he walked out of my life twenty-five-plus years ago.
“She’s beautiful,” he says, but I’m not feeling very generous.
I tap an invisible watch on my wrist. “I need to go to work soon,” I remind him.
He looks down at his hands. They are strong and large but marked with the veins and spots of his age. They shake slightly as he looks up at me. “Will you sit?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m good right here.” There’s no way I need to be any closer to this man.
“I’ll speak plainly, then,” he says. “I’m not here to waste your time.”
I lean against the wall and cross my arms, squeezing my eyes shut and thinking of my mom. What she’d think if she were here. What she would do. Mom was such a kind soul, but she had a sharp edge.
“I was a serial adulterer,” he admits, pressing his lips together. “My wife Gail and I were high school sweethearts. She’s a fantastic woman. Kind, smart.” He looks at me and shrugs. “I have no excuse for what I’ve put that woman through.”
I find it hard to feel any compassion for this Gail person, and I blurt it out. “How smart can she be if she never caught you in these, as you call them, serial affairs?”
He nods. “That’s a fair question. Gail is a doctor. She ran a successful practice for many, many years. In fact, our nanny was my first…infidelity.”
I open my mouth to respond but bite back my venom. I want to give him his ten minutes and then boot him out of my life forever.
“I ended up having three beautiful kids with Gail and three other children outside of my marriage. You were the first,” he admits.
“After your mother found out about my wife, she rightly cut me off from any contact with you. I won’t try to make it sound like I was a good man, but I did try, Bridget. ”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “You had kids with three other women? Not your wife?”
He nods. “The difference is I was always honest with my girlfriends after your mom.”
I’m stunned. Shocked, honestly. I drop down into an armchair across from the couch and shake my head at him. “What the hell does that mean? There are women who accepted being your…side piece?”
“Side piece…” he echoes, nodding. “Well, yeah. They did. Gail and I were very successful, and I was able to provide for them. I was probably a better father and partner part time than a lot of men are full time.”
“Oh my fucking God,” I seethe. “Are you kidding me? You expect me to believe you’re a good dad? A good partner?”
He shrugs. “I-I don’t know what you’re going to believe, Bridget. I’m doing a terrible job of explaining. What I’m here to do is apologize.”
He pulls an envelope out of his pocket. “For years, I supported my children and girlfriends, and Gail had no idea there was anyone else. Until Ginger was killed.” He tears up at that and takes a tissue from his pocket.
He dabs his eyes. “Ginger was my youngest. I got the news from her mother about eighteen months ago. Car accident. Ginger was riding her bike on the way to school—she was a college senior. Middle of the day, and one moment of inattention and she was gone.”
I feel bad for Ginger of course, bad for anyone who loses their life young and tragically.
And I suppose this Ginger would be my half sister, but it’s hard to process all the pieces of what James is telling me.
It’s a lot, and I’m starting to get nervous.
It’s nearly ten, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to being done.
“When Ginger died, I told Gail everything. I fell apart. Starting drinking heavily, which is not good for me. I’ve had lifelong type 2 diabetes, was diagnosed back in my twenties.
Anyway, I missed a lot of warning signs of things going on here.
” He motions to his torso. “Gail, as you can imagine, was devastated. Not only were there other children of mine out there, but to know that I’d been financially supporting two other families for all these years…
” He sighs. “She left me, as she should have. But that’s how I missed all the signs. ”
“Signs of what?” I rub my head, worry creasing my brow. I’m not worried for him, but for my job.
“Cancer,” he says simply. “Pancreatic.” He looks far off into the distance at a picture of my mom.
“Bridget, I’ve spent the last eighteen months questioning everything I’ve ever done.
I’ve spent nights drinking myself sick, crying, berating myself for everything I threw away.
Once I finally got my sorry ass into a doctor and they told me there was nothing more that could be done, I decided the only thing I could do was try to make some of my wrongs right. ”
I shake my head. “So, that’s what this is?
You making your wrongs right? You realize it’s way too little and you’re decades too late.
I’m sorry Ginger lost her life. I’m sorry you drank yourself into an early grave, but did you really expect to come here and tell me you’re dying and have it make one bit of difference?
How could you lie all those years? Why? Why wasn’t the family you had not enough? ”
“I know I can’t explain it,” he says. “I’m a selfish man.
Or, I was. I thought Gail having a demanding career and not as much time for my needs meant I should satisfy them elsewhere.
It only started out as sex, but when your mother had you…
I realized that I was addicted. To sex. To the chase.
Maybe even to the thrill of being a father. ”
“You weren’t a father,” I spit out. “Not to me. And how available could you have possibly been to the kids you did raise? What were your kids doing when you were out whoring it up? How did you have enough time for three families!”
He nods. “I have no defense for my actions, Bridget. None at all. You’re entitled to be angry.”
“You’re damned right I’m entitled to be angry.” I rush from the chair and pace to the kitchen. “You need to leave,” I tell him. “I’m not Ginger, and I’m not one of your kids. I don’t care if you’re my biological father. I want nothing more to do with you. Not now. Not ever.”
James takes my outburst in stride. He stands up from the couch, the envelope he had in his pocket now in his hands. “This is for you,” he says, holding it out to me.
“I don’t want it.” I shake my head and walk to the front door. “Get out of my house,” I say. “Don’t ever contact me again.”
He stands in place, looking paler than he did before. “Bridget,” he says weakly. “Please take this. Read it later, when you’ve calmed down…”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Calmed down?” I slam the front door closed, rattling the wood on its hinges. “I don’t want to calm down. I don’t need to calm down. I need you out of my fucking house!”
I feel slightly dizzy, I’m so worked up and angry. I storm across the living room and point in James’s face.
“You, sir, whoever you are, are not my father. You’re not a dad.
You’re a liar, a cheat, and, quite frankly, a thief.
Do you know how hard Mom and I worked, how much she gave up to provide a stable life for me?
Do you have any idea what it was like all those years without anyone to lean on?
” I wave my hands around, motioning toward my house.
“And you know what? The apple doesn’t fall far from the stupid tree.
I had a baby with a man who, likewise, couldn’t give two shits about being a father or a partner or anything else to me. ”
Now that I’m talking, the words are flying out of me.
I’m angry, sad, and I don’t give a shit about the time or my job.
I’m seeing red I’m so mad and sad. And if this man is really dying and he came here to apologize, I’m not going to let him go until I let him see firsthand what he’s apologizing for.
“You!” I scream, pointing at him. My nose is running and tears are flying down my face, but still, I don’t stop.
“You deprived my mother of joy. You stole any hope I had of having a family and a stable upbringing. Because you didn’t care about anything but getting your dick wet.
I hate you. I hate what you did, the life that you lived.
I’m sorry that so many people’s lives had to be hurt because you were a selfish, cowardly piece of shit. ”
He does something then that completely surprises me. He bursts into tears. Body-racking sobs. His face is red, and his grief is so raw and so real, I’m taken aback.
“You’re right,” he says. “And Bridget, I am sorry.” He sets the envelope in his shaking hands on my coffee table. “I’m sorry I disrupted your peace. Please read that when you have time. I don’t have much time left, but every minute until I leave this earth, I’ll be sorry for the pain I caused you.”
He opens my front door and turns back to me. “Goodbye, sweet Birdie. I would really have liked to know you.”
He closes the door behind him, tears still shaking his shoulders. And then, my father is gone.