Survivor guilt is real and nothing to be ashamed of. But one must remember, surviving isn’t a selfish act, it’s primal.
—VICTOR FLEMMING
Thirty minutes alone in the car with Victor isn’t bad.
Rachel would be wearing out her neck flashing me worried glances every five seconds. He just drives, quietly tapping out some tune with his thumbs on the steering wheel.
Before I know it, the wheels leave the pavement and crunch over a bumpy, gravel parking lot. I sit up and take in our dinner location: a small, dark building with a bright neon sign. The Tender Tavern looks like a bar.
“They serve food?” I ask.
“Best burgers this side of the Mississippi.” Victor parks and glances over. “They have other stuff, too. But their burgers are—” He kisses his fingertips like a French chef.
“Okay. I’m down for burgers.” I open my door and get out of the car. The cool night air floats a whiff of river brine in my direction. It’s one of my favorite scents and the thing I love most about living here. I’m always near water.
We crunch over the gravel toward the weathered wooden door. Victor holds it open for me. Inside the tavern is as worn as the outside. But where the outside has been roughed into craggy splintered edges, the inside is smoothed to a fine, faded patina. The formerly light wood of the bar has been rubbed to a dark, glossy mirror, while the formerly dark wooden floor features a light, burnished path down the middle.
A waitress with a bar rag tucked into her waistband approaches us. “You here for dinner?”
Victor nods.
She grabs a couple of menus and leads us toward the part of the dining room with more light and several occupied tables.
“What about one of those tables over in the corner?” Victor asks.
“Sure, darlin’,” she says. “Anywhere you like.” She threads her way through the maze of furniture and drops the menus on the table. Then she scoops up silverware and napkins from an adjacent table and deposits them, too. “I’ll be back to get your order in a minute, hon.”
Victor pulls out my chair for me and then sits to my right. He peruses the menu briefly before tapping it on the table. There’s a hint of nostalgia in his smile.
“I haven’t been here in years,” he says. “This used to be our hideaway place when we were in high school because they were a little lax in checking IDs,” he says.
“You drank in high school?” I’m not shocked that he did, just shocked that he’s admitting it.
He raises his eyebrows. “You don’t?” Then he puts up his hands. “Wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
I answer him anyway with a shake of my head. “The taste. Yuck.”
“Keep it that way if you can. Too many stupid things get done behind alcohol.”
The waitress comes and takes our order: two burgers with everything, soda for me, and a beer for Victor. She scoops up the menus but before she leaves, Victor stops her and cancels the beer, changing it to two sodas.
“I’m going to wash my hands,” he says, getting up from the table.
When he returns, his hair is damp and he’s grabbed a basket of peanuts in the shell from the bar. He sets it down and cracks open a nut.
“So, you know how this is going to go down, right?” he asks.
“What? Rachel and the chief?”
He plucks another peanut from the basket. “Yeah. My guess is my sister will move slowly and take a lot of time with this. It’s her first wedding, after all. You’ll probably be away at college before she ever moves him in.”
“That’s not what she said, though.” I look him in the eye. “She told me she wouldn’t do anything until I was ready, but basically it’s my choice. I can live with them at the chief’s house, or stay in our house … with you.” Saying that out loud suddenly sounds too personal. “So, you know, I can be close to my friends.”
He looks surprised, but not in a bad way.
“She said that?”
“Yes. She said she thought you’d like to live in your parents’ house for a while.”
“It’s true. I love that house.” His look drifts and becomes misty. Then he brings it back to me. “Lots of memories there. I bet you can say the same thing, right?”
I nod.
“I’m not as good a cook as Rachel, but I have a few skills. I’d be thrilled if you wanted to stay and bunk in with me.”
There’s no contest between staying in my house versus moving in with the chief. But this is way too fast. I haven’t had a chance to process it yet. “Full disclosure, I’m not very good with change.”
“Me either,” he says. “But suddenly we’re both faced with a bunch of it.” He pauses and rubs his hands across his face. “Full disclosure…” He radiates a sudden worry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just there’s something important that I need to tell you. And this might be as good a time as any.” He squirms a little. “It’s not bad … at least I don’t think it’s bad. Your mileage could vary. But it is important. Honesty is always important, right? And listen—this is important too—I’m getting ready to tell you something and I need to know that you’re not suddenly going to jump up and run out of here. I don’t think it would look good for me to be chasing you around a dark parking lot in this neighborhood. If you know what I mean.”
He’s slipped over into babbling. And I have a pretty good idea why. I flash back to the unopened FedEx envelope. I lean forward, pressing my elbows into the table. “Are you getting ready to tell me you slept with my mother?”
Bam! I said it, just like that. I didn’t know I had the guts.
“Whoa. What?” Shocked, he scoots back from the table. He glances around for the waitress and blots his mouth with his napkin. Then he chuckles.
“I knew. Well, I didn’t exactly know. But I saw you in the hospital put the swab in your mouth and then into the envelope along with mine. So … I suspected.”
He grins, a combination of embarrassed and proud. “You’d make a great poker player. You’ve got some seriously stealth moves.”
“With everything going on the last couple of weeks it kind of slipped to the bottom of my ‘things I’m worried about’ list.”
“But you saw the FedEx envelope?”
I nod. “You still haven’t opened it.”
“Well, I thought about opening it and then I thought I should wait and tell you first. I wanted the two of us to be on equal footing. I wanted us both to know that this is something that’s possible.”
“So, it really is possible”—my voice softens and clouds with emotion—“I could be your daughter?”
He pauses, but his look is like a beam of bright, unfiltered emotion. “In this whole world, there’s nothing that would make me happier or make my life more complete.” His voice catches at the end too.
“Here you go, two burgers with everything.” The waitress barges right over the moment. She sets down plates of food in front of each of us. Then she unloads condiments from the various pockets on her apron.
Victor and I are frozen. Struck. Staring across the table at each other. I’m not even thinking about the words. Tiny pinpoints of light explode. All these years I dreamed about this moment and all I wanted was for him—whoever him turned out to be—to be happy about meeting me.
Victor definitely looks happy.
“Are you two playing that ‘see who blinks first’ game?” the waitress asks.
“No!” Victor and I say it at the same time, never breaking eye contact.
“Okay.” She sounds skeptical, like she doesn’t believe us. “Anything else I can—”
“No. We’re good,” Victor says, looking away.
“Really good,” I add, also looking away.
The waitress moves off.
“Just so you know, I was more worried over how I would feel if it turned out not to be true.” Victor shakes his head, swallowing hard. “I’ll confess I didn’t want to face that alone.”
“You don’t have to.” I set my hand on the table next to my plate. He puts his forward and pats mine.
“That’s right. We’re in this together. It’s been one hell of a night; I say we cap it off by opening the envelope as soon as we get home.”
“Yeah. Let’s rip it open,” I agree. “We can do it together. Each take an end and tear.”
I take a bite of my hamburger. “Mmmmm.” He’s not wrong. Juicy and perfectly seasoned. I adopt an expression of bliss and point to the burger.
“What’d I tell you?” He kisses his fingers again, à la the chef.
“So, when did you…” I twirl my finger as I search for the right words.
“First put two and two together?” he asks. “That night, in the hospital. I was filling out the police report after old Carl tried to kill us. I had to call Rachel to get your birthdate. Everything about the report was focused on your mom and dates for specific things and how old you were then and now. And, I don’t know, all of a sudden everything just lined up.”
“Does Rachel know?” I have always suspected that Rachel knew the identity of my father but wasn’t saying. But if she knew Victor was my real father it might explain why she would consider letting me live with him.
Victor vehemently shakes his head. Then he pauses. “Well, let me put it this way: I never said anything to her. But I don’t know about your mother.”
“My mother never told you either. Right?”
Victor heaves a big sigh. “No. And I have quite a bit of guilt surrounding that. It’s the one thing that makes me think this might not be true. I can’t imagine what I might have done that would have made your mother feel like she couldn’t tell me about you.”
“Maybe she knew…” I gasp for a second, summoning courage, then forge ahead. “Maybe she knew you didn’t love her.” These are difficult words but they need to be said. The one thing I always hoped was that my mother loved my father. That I was born out of an exquisite union. And that it didn’t matter to her or to me if he didn’t feel the same way.
“Let me just say that I loved your mother in every way possible. Growing up, I almost can’t remember a time when she wasn’t part of our family. She was family. Then I was gone to the FBI for a couple of years. When I came back for my own mother’s funeral, well, your mother was … she had changed. Or I had. Anyway, your mother was unforgettable.”
“And yet…” I call him out with my look.
“Yeah. I know.” The guilt lies thick in his voice. “What can I say? I was young and didn’t know what I wanted in life. I thought I wanted out of this town. She wanted out too. She was going to Italy and Paris and I was locked and loaded for Virginia. I had just gotten a promotion and a book contract.”
He pauses to concentrate on his burger, so I do the same.
After a few bites, he speaks again. “Just so you know, your mother was way out of my league. She was classy and elegant. She knew which fork to use and how to pull together an outfit that looked like it just came off the runway. I was a science nerd. No one would have ever thought I had an actual chance with her.”
Somehow, we manage to finish every scrap of food on our plates. Victor sits back in his chair. “Do you remember the speech I gave you that day in the hospital?”
“About coming home and wanting a family?”
“Yes. I said it then and it’s still true to this very minute. You changed me, Erin. I honestly don’t care what it says in that envelope. You and me … we’re family.”
Amazing how one night can go from lowest low to highest high in just a couple of hours.