Matthew understood how conflicted she must feel. He felt conflicted, and he wasn't personally involved. He was worried about Becca, but now that he saw her anger, a part of him wanted to defend Walt, too. “Maybe he had reasons. If your mother never explained . . .”
She sent him an incredulous look. “I'm almost thirty. A guy's got to have a really serious excuse to miss the first thirty years of his daughter's life, don't you think? Maybe if he'd been abducted by terrorists, or contracted amnesia for three decades.”
Matthew nodded.
“He must want something,” she said. “Why else would he come all this way to this town?”
“You'll never know for sure until you speak to him.”
“And say what? âGee, Dad, where have you been all my life?' ”
“Aren't you curious?”
“Yes!” Her mouth set into a grim line. “That's another reason I resent him. Grow up with a big question mark for a father and you become comfortable with mystery. I even got to fantasize that my dad could be anybody. But having some ex-junkie hunt me down and tell me
he's
my dad? I could live without that.”
“Junkie?” Matthew frowned. “I didn't know.”
“Oh, Walt's got quite a past. More of one than I ever dreamed, apparently. And he never tried to hide anything from meâexcept the most important detail.”
Matthew pointed out, “Maybe he never intended for you to know.”
“He came over here Monday night to talk, but I was in a weird mood and gave him such a depressing account of my life that he fled.” She stopped, shaking her head at the memory. “I said all sorts of awful things about my unknown dadâbasically called him a loser point-blank.”
“But if you didn't know about him then . . .”
“That sort of makes it worse, doesn't it? He knows I was giving my unvarnished opinion. Not that I care. He deserves to hear the worst.” Becca resumed her pacing. “Mom told me he was bad news. She must have worried this would happen. She never said it in so many words, but the thought that he would come crawling out of the woodwork at some point couldn't have been far from her mind.”
“She probably worried when you were on television that your father would come begging for money. But he didn't do that.”
A mirthless laugh snuffled out of her. “He didn't have to. All he had to do was show up and I started writing checks. I'm an idiot.” She glanced at the leftover juice in her glass. “Some vodka in this would really hit the spot right now.” She opened a cabinet behind her and grabbed a Smirnoff bottle by the neck.
Matthew darted around the island and interceded before she could make a grave beverage error. “Do you think that's a good idea?”
“It's been a great idea since vodka first met OJ.”
“But a bad one since alcohol first met emotionally charged situations. Also, you're going to have to drive to the hospital. You need to talk to Walt. Putting it off won't help.”
She gazed regretfully at the bottle and stashed it away again. “You're right. Probably best if I don't end up with a DWI on the way.” When she turned around, they were standing much closer than before. “What made you come over here?”
“I wanted to find out about Walt. Also, Olivia told me about Career Day. I'm sorry about that. I should have called to tell you that you didn't need to go over there.”
“Oh, that's okay,” she said dismissively. “I'd almost forgotten the whole thing, to tell you the truth. That's the kind of day it's been.”
“Olivia said you went over big with the kids, though.”
“Did she?” A smile touched her lips. “That's nice. I never expected to find old television buffs in a room full of fifth-graders.”
“Your appeal crosses generations.”
“What did Nicole say?” she asked. “Seeing her there was something I didn't expect.”
No kidding. “Her sudden appearance was a curveball to me, too. She just showed up last night. No warning.”
“And she was ready with the PowerPoint presentation first thing this morning. I call that impressive.” She turned her attention to her juice glass again. “And she's okay?”
It was a benign question, but Matthew couldn't forget last night's crying jag. “I'm not sure. She seemed tense. And not all that glad to see me. She kept saying it was a relief to be home, but she didn't look happy.”
“I'm sure it's not about you.”
“It could be,” he said. “Maybe she senses a change.”
Becca eyed him with interest. “You've changed?”
“I'm more . . . conflicted.” He searched for a good way to express his feelings, while at the same time he was at a loss as to why he felt compelled to say anything at all. Especially to Becca. It was probably a mistake, but he plunged ahead. “I think she might be picking up on the fact that I have feelings for you. She might have even sensed it before I did.”
He waited for Becca's reaction. She seemed so still, rigid. Then he realized that
was
her reaction. Heat crept up his neck as the silence in the kitchen stretched. He wished she'd say something. Anything.
“Are you crazy?” she finally asked.
Anything but that. “Is that how you respond when men admit they like you?”
“You
can't
like me,” she said. “Not the way you mean.” She took a stiff step backward. “You can like-like me. Anything else would really mess things up.”
“For whom?”
“Everybody. What about Olivia? She looks on you like a dad.”
The thought brought a tightening to his throat. To thinkâwhen he first met Nicole, he worried about how her daughter would affect the relationship. Then Olivia became the relationship's glue. But that obviously wasn't enough. “She's fond of me, but she knows I'm not her father. I'm not sure, given her real father, that the word means much to her.”
“That's all the more reason why you can't abandon her. Think how awful that would be.”
“I'm not in a relationship with Olivia,” he said. “And lately, I haven't been in a relationship with Nicole. She doesn't want to get married. Olivia called me the babysitter once. At the time I thought she was joking, but she might actually have hit the nail on the head.”
Becca shook her head. “She loves you.”
“I can't stay in a relationship with Nicole just for Olivia's sake.”
“But you can't just walk away, can you?”
“I wouldn't walk away from Olivia.”
“You'd have to,” Becca pointed out. “And losing Olivia would be just the start. Relationships breed a whole social ecosystem. If one falls apart, you don't know what the consequences will be for any number of other people.”
“Ecosystems?” He raked a hand through his hair in frustration. “You make it sound as though we're endangered salamanders. I doubt that you were taking such a long, objective view when you left Cal.”
“But I should have,” she said. “I should have been taking the long view before Cal and I ever got involved. I caused more damage than I knew.”
“That's hindsight. You can't always foresee every ripple.”
“But you can't blunder ahead when you know it's a bad idea, either.”
He couldn't believe they were arguing. Not a promising start to anything. “So you plan to live as if feelings don't enter the picture anymore? Or love?”
“We're not the only ones with feelings, though. What aboutâ”
From the look on her face, he guessed that she realized the implications of her words at the same moment they hit him.
We're
. So she thought of them as a we, at least subconsciously. It wasn't a declaration of love. It wasn't kisses and joy. But that one simple contraction set a world of hope in motion.
Matthew reached forward to take her in his arms, but she darted just out of reach. “That would be so wrong. Don't you see?”
He released a ragged, regretful sigh. “I see that there's a lot unresolved.”
“Understatement of the year.” She took her glass and slugged down the remaining orange juice, gulping as if it actually did have vodka in it. “I can't think about this right now. I need to go to the hospital.”
Watching her gather up her purse, remorse overtook him. She had the problem of Waltâpossibly her long-lost fatherâto deal with, and he'd chosen this day to tell her how he felt about her. Great timing. No wonder she seemed flustered.
Belatedly, he remembered what he'd intended to say when he'd knocked on her door. “If you need any help manning the shop this week, call me,” he said. “Call me for anything.”
“You may live to regret those words.” She headed for the stairwell as if she were a parting visitor, and even clattered down several steps before turning around and appearing again. “This is my apartment.”
He moved past her and headed down the stairs. “Good luck, and let me know how it goes.” He stopped. “Would you like me to go with you to the hospital?”
“NoâI think this is something I've got to do alone.” Her lips pressed into a narrow line. “It'll be my first ever father-daughter chat.”
Chapter 16
At the hospital, her body remained rooted in the driver's seat. She looked across the parking lot, dreading what she had to do, and what she might find out. Which would be worseâto spend the rest of her life with her paternity a big question mark, or to find out her dad really was a broken-down wreck of an ex-con?
Both life and elections needed to come with a none-of-the-above option.
Taking a deep breath, she extracted herself from the front seat and headed in. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach as her shoes squeaked down the linoleum halls. In contrast to this morning, she walked into Walt's room empty-handed.
Not that he seemed to notice, or mind. He looked up from the murder mystery she'd given him earlier and smiled. “Rebecca! You shouldn't have come all the way back out here to see me.”
He was obviously feeling better, but he still seemed vulnerable. Without his hat, he looked a little bit like a bird without feathers. And nothing said
defenseless
like a person in a hospital gown.
She shut the door behind her and made her way to the visitor's chair next to the bed. She craned her head around the break in the curtain to see if his roommate was sleeping, but the bed had been stripped.
“Was your roommate discharged?”
“There was a little problem there.” Walt pushed a button at the side of the bed, raising the back higher. “We were playing poker earlier, and Lester lost a little money.”
She closed her eyes. “You swindled an old man recovering from hip surgery?”
“I didn't cheat,” Walt said. “And he was the one who insisted on playing for stakes. Lay there bragging about how good at cards he was. He didn't know how many hours I'd put in playing poker.”
Not a lot else to do in prison, she supposed. “What did he lose?”
“His Jell-O from lunch, two melba toast packets, and eighty-six dollars.”
“Eighty-six dollars!”
“It was all fair and square,” he said. “Man just wasn't the bluffer he thought he was.”
Unlike Walt. She shifted in the chair. “I shouldn't have brought you those cards.”
“Lester took it okay. It was his family who got upset. His wife and son came by, and the next thing I knew, the orderlies were moving him to a private room.”
She couldn't think of a response to that. The idea that he had been sitting here all day blithely reading books and playing poker while she had spent the afternoon in a mental frenzy irritated her. So did the fact that she'd been sitting here less than five minutes and she was already distracted.
“How are things at the shop?” he asked.
“I closed it today.”
“Not on account of me, I hope. I told you that you didn't need to trouble yourself about any of this.”
“Stop,” she said, annoyed by his don't-mind-me act. “Just stop. I saw your hospital paperwork, Walt. I read the form where you wrote down that I'm your daughter.”
His face collapsed, the deep worry lines and wrinkles going slack. “A patient's records are supposed to be confidential.”
“Not so confidential when you have someone down as your next of kin.”
“Oh.” He looked down at his hands, which were fiddling with the white hospital sheet. “I'm sorry you had to find out that way.”
“How did you expect me to find out?” she asked, her voice tight. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I hadn't quite made up my mind.”
“Did you plan to make it up ever? According to the doctor I talked to last night, you've been sick for some time.”
He met her gaze. “That's why I didn't say anything, see? I didn't want you to feel obligated to me out of pity.”
Pity? The word sent her shooting out of her chair. She strode restlessly to the foot of his bed. “You don't have to worry about that. I pitied you plenty right up to the moment when I found out who you were. Now I'm just mad.” She narrowed her eyes on him. “If you really are my father. I'm not convinced.”
He nodded. “Your mother was Rhonda Hudson. Ronnie.”
“Google could've told you that.”
“I met her when she was working as a waitress in LA. She hadn't been there long. She'd left Nebraska just after high school and needed the job, but she hated waitressing and said she'd never do it again. She had reddish blond hair, lighter than yours, and she loved musicals, Robert Redford, and the Lakers. For my twenty-fourth birthday, she made me a strawberry cake, just like the one you made the other day. When I bit into it, it was like she was right there in the room with us. Happiness on a plate, like she always said.”
Becca swallowed. It wasn't that he knew those things, so much as the way he said them. He wasn't just reciting, he was dragging information out of his heart. Out of her heart.
“I'm sorry if you're disappointed. I can't blame you, though.” One of his eyebrows darted up ruefully. “I'm not exactly a king or a movie star.”
“No, you're not.” She remembered their conversation Monday. If he really was her father, her ramblings must have been painful to listen to.
Good,
she thought, fighting against the swell of emotion building inside her. Maybe it was all true, what he said. If it wasn't, he was diabolical.
He scratched the top of one hand. “I was real surprised when you didn't recognize my full name when I gave it to you for your employee records. That was when I realized that Ronnie must not have told you anything about me.”
“She told me your name was Johnny. And that you played the saxophone. That was the one good thing she had to say about you.” She crossed her arms. “You do play, don't you?”
He nodded. “Tenor and baritone. But it's been a while. I hocked my saxes a long time ago, and they don't come cheap.”
“And your name? What happened to that?”
“It was Johnny. John Walter Johnson. I was called Johnny Johnson. I never liked it much. Your mom and I joked about it. We were Ronnie and Johnny. Pretty stupid-sounding couple.”
She folded her arms. “To hear Mom tell it, nothing about you two as a couple made sense.”
He winced. “I guess she hated me. I never realized.”
“What did you expect?” Becca's voice looped up, but she didn't care. She could mute her anger for her own sake, but for her mom's? That self-pitying wince made her blood boil. “Did you imagine she'd think back in fondness about the guy who'd left her pregnant?”
“I wouldn't have been any good for her.”
“How do you know that? According to her, you never even tried.”
“She was better off without me. We both knew it, and she told me that point-blank. I was using back then. She said she'd rather a kid of hers have no father at all than me. And then I ended up in jail, twice, which just showed me she'd been right.”
“You're not using now, or in jail. At some point you managed to pull yourself together. At least a little bit.”
“Because I had to. The second time I got sent up, they sent me to a rehab unit first before tossing me back into the regular pen. That's where I first saw you, during that second stretch.” He shook his head. “I remember feeling shocked when I saw you in a magazineâRonnie and you. I was surprised she didn't give you my last name.”
Becca spluttered in indignation. “Why should she have done that? You weren't my father. You aren't now. I don't care if the blood in my veins is fifty percent you. As far as I'm concerned, you were a sperm donor. People don't name their kids after a sperm donor.”
He hung his head. “I see that now. I get it. But at the time, it was like realizing I didn't exist at all, to her or to you. Or anybody, really. It upset me.”
“Well, boo flippin'-hoo,” she said, coming near to shouting. “You know what upset me? That I didn't know who you were, or why you'd never cared enough to even meet me. When I was little, I blamed myself. Isn't that stupid? I was a kid, but I thought your not being there was all my fault. I wondered if there was something about me that made my dad not want to know me. And you want to know the saddest, most twisted thing of all? When I got a little older, I blamed Mom. Mom, who probably went through God-knows-what with her own parents when she told them she was pregnant with me and wanted to keep me. They certainly never helped her out much.”
“They didn't approve of me,” he said. “Can't blame them for that.”
“They never approved of me, either, and I do blame them for it. Now. But at the time I blamed Mom for not being nice, pretty, or whatever enough to keep my dad with us. Meanwhile, she was working her tail off to support us both. Later, I resented her because I didn't get as much stuff as the really rich kids at school, the ones who had dads who worked at fabulous jobs and moms who lavished them with everything they wanted. Mom lavished me with love, but that wasn't good enough. She also paid off our house and paid boarding for Harvey, who had been given to me when I was making lots of money on TV. Maybe she could have tapped in to my savings to defray the expenses for my horse, but she didn't. When I reached adulthood, I had most of the money I'd made as a kid, plus interest. That was Mom. She loved me even when I was an ungrateful, snotty teen. She was worth a hundred dads. In fact, if I'd traded her for a million of you, I'd still have been cheated.”
His cheeks reddened. Once she'd blown off some steam, she wondered how she could feel so good about ripping into some guy who was so sick and defenseless.
He's defenseless because he put himself in this position.
Not that he was responsible for his health problemsâas far as she knew. Abusing drugs all those years had to have contributed something. Or maybe he just had bad kidneys. Or maybe it was a combination.
But he did deserve every bad-dad accusation she could hurl at him.
He exhaled a long breath, then met her gaze as if he was almost afraid to do so. The look reminded her of when she'd met him. He'd seemed anxious then, too. Of course. There was no way for him to have known that she'd never seen so much as a photo of her father. If she'd recognized him, she might have wanted him gone immediately.
“I get your anger,” he said.
“Good, because I don't think it's going anywhere.”
“I only meant to say that I was hurt at first, all those years ago,” he explained. “And then I looked around me. I was in prison. I'd been there before, but it had never seemed so damn real to me. I was surrounded by thieves, murderers, drug dealers. You name it. I was one of them. And then I looked at where you were. On television. In a different universe.”
She tried to imagine it.
“That was the moment when I understood what I was,” he said. “I was nothing. I might as well have taken my life and chucked it off a railroad bridge.” He reached a shaky hand over for a glass of water. “I'm glad Ronnie kept my life hidden from you. She did the absolute right thing. I never let on to anyone who you were, either. I even tried to forget it myself.”
A cynical laugh bubbled out of her. “Sounds like the one thing you were really successful at.”
“But you see, I couldn't really forget. I'd see a picture of you, or once or twice on the television screen in the prison dayroom, and I'd think,
That's my daughter. If something that good is a part of me, I can't be all bad. I can't be a no-hoper like all the scum around me.
I started trying harder. I got my high school degree, and I tried to learn to talk better. I found different people on the blockânot the ones I'd been hanging around with. Took a little shit for that, I can tell you.”
She frowned, attempting to piece together the chronology. “When was this?”
“Oh, back in the late nineties, I guess. I got out in 2003.”
“Over a decade ago?” Her blood pressure started to spike again.
“Well, yeah. I got out, and my first thought was looking up Ronnie and Rebecca. I've always thought of you as Rebecca. Didn't know you'd shortened it.”
“You seem to have changed yours, too.”
“That was part of me wanting to be different, I guess. When I got out, I started dressing a little different, and called myself Walt. That was my granddad's name. I took whatever work I could find. Real work.”
“Where?”
“Los Angeles.”
“You were in LA all that time?”
He nodded. “I went past Ronnie's house once or twice. I even saw you on the street, or thought I did. But I . . .” He shrugged. “I can't explain. In jail, my goal was to get out, go straight, and look up my family. But when I got out, it struck me how dumb that was. You weren't really my family, and even if I was clean, you were still better off without me. Like you saidâhaving a person like me for a father was a cheat. And I figured Ronnie'd probably found somebody else anyway.”
She had dated a few men, but nothing had ever come of those relationships. Becca always assumed it was because she was too busy working and being a mom. Now she wondered. She wondered about everything.
“I also didn't want you or Ronnie to think I was looking you up to mooch off you,” he said.
“So why did you look me up here?”
“I can't say.”
She pursed her lips. “Can't, or won't?”
“I lost my job, and . . .” He looked her in the eye. “The closest explanation I've got is that I just wanted to see you. So I could tell you I was sorry.”
A band squeezed her chest, and she fought to take a deep breath. One sorry didn't make up for a lifetime. It didn't help her mom. And Matthew's warning was still in her head. He liked Walt, yet he'd counseled caution, and he probably still would. Walt had lost his job, so he'd looked her up. Maybe it was sentimentality that had brought him here, or maybe he'd thought she was rich.