Chapter 2
TRAFFIC THICKENS AS I APPROACH BOSTON, BUT AT LEAST THE RAIN has subsided. My stomach is in knots, and I wonder if I’m doing the right thing.
At thirty-two I’m going to meet my father for the first time.
My mother had gotten pregnant with me after a short relationship with a young man who’d just graduated from college and was touring the country.
He’d stopped off at Mom’s small hometown, Truckee, California, and they’d become involved.
When he found out she was pregnant, he left as fast as he could without a backward glance. That’s what my mother told me anyway.
She raised me alone and refused to tell me his name, saying that we were better off without him. Who leaves a pregnant eighteen-year-old to fend for herself and their baby? On my birth certificate, in the father’s spot, is just one word: Unknown.
When I was growing up, we moved from one little town to another. Mom worked at all kinds of jobs: fast food, department stores, plant nurseries, which were her favorites. But money was always scarce.
We crisscrossed the country. Eventually, we made it to Albany, New York, and she started to wind down from her wanderlust. By the time I started high school, we were permanent residents.
She worked her way up to manager of a local nursery and our lives stabilized.
I started to pressure her to tell me about my father, but she would get angry and tell me that I was better off not knowing.
This caused a lot of friction between us, but then college loomed, and I jumped at the chance to get out on my own.
Armed with grants, scholarships, and student loans, I found a new life, one that suited me, a place where I could find a quiet corner and write.
After I left Ben, I moved back in with my mom, into the tiny house we had shared before I got married. I was trying to make sense of my life, trying to figure out what was next after the divorce, when tragedy struck.
My mother’s death was sudden, unexpected.
She was young, just fifty. During a summer storm, she’d been driving a country road when her car skidded and hit an embankment.
She’d been killed instantly. Ben had been telling her for months, “Lana, those tires are bald. You need to replace them. They’re dangerous.
” But after all those years of scraping by, counting change to pay bills, Mom wasn’t keen on spending money.
I was numb. My mother was the only family I had ever known and while she was different, unconventional, and maddening sometimes, we were close.
After the shock had worn off, after the memorial service was over, I went through the junk that crowded the house.
Mom wasn’t exactly a hoarder, but she was close.
I felt a little guilty as I went through her personal things, but I held a secret wish that I might, finally, find out who my father was.
Had she left a clue somewhere in her stacks of papers?
And I found out at last. I thought for years that he must be a criminal.
Maybe a con man or a rapist, my mother was so adamant that we were better off without him, so when I finally found his name, I expected to find him in prison somewhere, or dead from his misdeeds maybe.
I never expected to find out that he was famous.