16 Things I Thought were True Part 26

J a n e t G u r t l e r on until my feet bleed. Maybe walking all the way home, but my b.u.t.t is Velcroed to the cus.h.i.+on.

"Is she here with you? Your mom?"

"No. I came with...friends." And then, in spite of everything, a tiny smile tugs at my lips. Amy and Adam are friends. Real friends.

And I know, when I return to the hostel, they're going to be there for me. They're going to help me get through this. "They're at the Stingray Hostel. That's where we're staying." I should have let them come along.

She nods. "Are you in college?"

"No. I start my senior year of high school in September."

We stare at each other.

"I didn't know," I say, "that Bob didn't know about me. My mom..." It sounds stupid. I sound stupid. I am so over my head here, it's not even funny. I stand up. "I should go."

I have the real story now, and it's certainly not the story I thought it was. I've seen him. But the truth is, you can't leave someone you don't know about.

She scoops up the cat and stands. "No." She touches my arm.

"You shouldn't go. Let me talk to Bob for a minute. I'm his wife, by the way. I'll be right back. Sit." She points at the chair, and as if I'm a puppy in obedience school, my b.u.t.t drops back in the seat. She walks out again, and I hear a low buzz of voices outside the den.

I have no idea what to do. I wring my hands together and glance down at my purse. I want to take out my phone. Tweet this moment. Make it funny, less traumatic. The stupidity of it all. My mom and her lies. Omission is lying. Only bigger. Way bigger.

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e Now I know why she's been frantically texting me. But she let it go too long. Again.

I imagine ways I can turn this horrible, embarra.s.sing encounter into a tweet my followers will enjoy. Camille pops back into the den. Her face is impossible to read. She walks over and sits in the chair beside me. "How long are you here?" she asks.

"We're leaving Sunday."

"He's going to want to talk to you, to see you. But..." Her lips press tight and something flashes in her eyes. Anger? "He's gone for a run."

I stare at her, blinking. "Pardon me?"

She sighs. "He runs when he's stressed. He's pretty overwhelmed."

She laughs, but the sound is tinged with bitterness. "I have no idea how long he'll be gone. Could be half an hour. Could be four hours. He does marathons, so he can run a long time."

"He left?" I shake my head. It makes no sense. I stand up, put my purse over my shoulder, squish my eyebrows together. Bob White just found out he has a daughter so he's leaving to go for a run. It's perfect. Exercise to Bob must equal wine to Mom. He may not have abandoned me when I was a baby, but he certainly did just now.

"Can you leave me some contact info so we can call you later? I know he's going to want to talk to you. He just needs...to process."

An inappropriate giggle tickles the inside of my nose. Maybe my mom was right to not tell him about me. Maybe he would have run off the first time. It's ridiculous. I'm more than a little freaked out myself, but I'm not running away. "No," I tell Camille, and the urge to laugh vanishes.

"Morgan," Camille says. "He'll come around." She walks closer, 173.

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J a n e t G u r t l e r puts her hand on my shoulder. "This is a big deal. Leaving wasn't the best idea. But this is how he deals, with exercise." She shakes her head. "It's a shock after eighteen years. He needs to process it.

Neither one of you is the bad guy here."

I duck away from her hand and retrace my footsteps toward the front door. She's implying my mom is the bad guy, and that's certainly what every arrow is pointing to. But despite what she's done, despite it all, she's still my mom. How am I going to deal with that? Everything is mixed up. This scenario is so different from anything I imagined or even tried not to imagine, I don't know how to process it.

"Maybe she had a good reason for not telling me about him," I say to Camille. "Maybe he would have taken off like this the first time."

"No. This is different. He's not gone forever. He's gone to think.

Listen, he's not perfect. Who is? But he's not a bad man."

I hurry toward the front door. She's right behind me. "The twins'

dad is in their lives. So why did my mom choose not to tell Bob?"

My mom stayed. She raised me without any help. I put my hand on the front door handle.

"There is nothing about Bob that should worry you. I promise you that." I turn the k.n.o.b. "This wasn't his fault. Morgan? Can you leave me your number? Please?"

I push the front door, wanting to say no, but I can't. I ramble off my cell number but she doesn't write it down, she only nods.

I wonder how she'll remember, if she'll forget or mess it up. I'm hopeful she will and worried she will at the same time.

"I'm sorry," she says, and there are tears in her eyes. "For both of you. He's a good man, Morgan. And you seem like a nice girl."

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e "Thank you," I manage and close the door behind me. I pull out my phone and write a tweet.

My dad didn't even know I was born.

And then I glance up and stop on the sidewalk when I see what's outside.

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chapter sixteen.

10. Never rely on a backup system.

#thingsIthoughtweretrue A horn blasts. Amy's bright yellow Mazda is parked on the oppo- site side of the road from Bob White's car. In this neighbor- hood, it looks like a kiddie b.u.mper car from the amus.e.m.e.nt park.

I hurry down the pebbled walk. The front driver's window is unrolled. Adam's arm is resting on it. His gla.s.ses are slipping down his nose a little. He looks like a complete and total nerd, and he's exactly what I didn't know I needed. But I do.

I run across the street toward the car.

"Hey," he says as I get closer.

"What're you doing here?"

"Thought you might need backup," he says.

I look at the pa.s.senger seat and peer into the back. "Where's Amy?" I walk around to the pa.s.senger door and climb inside the car. It still smells like Cheezies.

"I asked Amy if I could take the car and go see my girlfriend," he says. "I lied."

"What're you doing here?"

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J a n e t G u r t l e r He glances down at his crotch. My eyes follow his. His phone is in his lap. Thank G.o.d. "I was worried about you. And I saw the tweet about your dad a second ago."

There's a loud honking in the sky. I glance up at a flock of Canada geese flying in the sky. In a V formation. I watch them, envious of their ability to fly wherever they want to go. I wonder if birds stick with their families or if the parents abandon them. How do they decide who leads?

"What happened?" he asks softly.

I blink and forget the birds, turning back to Adam. I sigh. "What are you doing here?" I repeat.

He lifts his shoulder and gazes straight into my eyes. "This is a big deal. Meeting your...father for the first time." He reaches for my hand, but I pull away and tuck it in my lap and turn my head. It's dark outside. Finally. It's been one of the longest days of my life.

I bite my lip. "Why did you come alone? Where's Amy?"

"I thought Amy might be, I don't know, a distraction." He pushes up his gla.s.ses. "She's in the common room at the hostel. She made friends with two old ladies from England. When I left, they were talking about tea. I thought you might, you know...need someone.

Either way it went." He blinks, and his eyes are round and s.h.i.+ne with sympathy. He lifts a shoulder unapologetically.

I sigh and it's so big and so loud that it seems to suck up all the air in the car. I open up my window a little, and a night breeze blows in. Bob White's house looks different in the dark. The big, stupid house of the man who didn't even know I existed until a few 178.

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e minutes ago. I imagine how much it must suck for him and try to think how it would make me feel. But it's hard. I feel so alone.

"What about your girlfriend?" I ask Adam. "You came all this way for her, didn't you?" I half wish a boy would come and rescue me. I try not to wish it were him.

He lifts his chin. "What happened with your dad?"

"Adam," I repeat. "What about your girlfriend?" It suddenly has more importance than it should. Even in the darkness of the car, lit only by the outside streetlights, I can tell his cheeks are red.

"Well." He glances at me and then grins. "Technically, I don't really have a girlfriend anymore. If you must know the truth, she dumped me."

"She dumped you? When did you talk to her?" My knee bounces up and down, up and down. A tiny bit of happy leaks into the puddle of sad and confusion swirling inside me.

"Um. At the end of school. She's actually dating some guy who's a shoo- in for Stanford Medical now."

I stare at him. "You haven't had a girlfriend all summer? You've been pretending?" I have an urge to laugh- and then to punch him hard because I'm so sick of lies.

"Well, it sounds worse when you say it like that. It was just easier to pretend to have a girlfriend at work. Some girls at work are super stalky. Like Amy." He snorts, but when I narrow my eyes, he stops.

I stay silent, my lips pursed, waiting for more. I'm good at silent treatments, taught by a champion.

"But you told me you had a girlfriend at the hospital."

He looks out his window and clears his throat. "That's because 179.

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J a n e t G u r t l e r I, um...I was embarra.s.sed. You were all worried about your mom and I was acting all weird, so I blurted out the fake girlfriend thing.

It was dumb, I know..." He stops and doesn't look at me.

I can't believe I'm sitting in front of my father's fancy house, talking about this. It's hard not to laugh. It's also hard not to be a teeny bit happy, despite everything.

"You made up a girlfriend?" I'd much rather talk about this than my dad.

"I may have exaggerated my girlfriend status by a few months but she's real. We broke up." He lifts a shoulder and meets my gaze. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. Then it got too awkward to admit the truth."

I sigh. "I'm sorry. It's not like I've never done anything stupid."

Adam doesn't say anything.

I stare at the house Bob lives in. On the outside, it's so beautiful.

"He didn't even know about me," I say quietly. "My dad. As in...

my mom never told him she was pregnant. Eighteen years ago.

And nothing since. He had no idea."

Adam gasps. "No way."

"Yup."

"That's really, really crazy."