Chapter 34

 

 

Sam had never felt nerves like this. Spazzing and sparking and buzzing.

Even under the most dire of circumstances her heart usually remained at a steadfast rhythmic treble, but when Raul called on a random Wednesday night, a working middle-of-the-week night, asking to meet her for dinner, with something important to discuss, she knew. She knew he had read his mother Lilith’s letter in her column and he had pieced her web of omissions together.

Sam had intended to make it as clear as day for him, that she had met his father and published his mother’s diary, but she hadn’t considered the fallout of his discovery. Not until now.

“What is this?”

With Muhammad Ali looking over his shoulder, Raul sat across from Sam at the same restaurant Sam had met his father, in the same wobbly booth. She had suggested this place for Raul, so he might perhaps feel the lingering of his father’s presence in the very seat where he sat. Perhaps it would help soften the blow.

“Uh, well…” Sam stuttered.

“Explain why this sounds a lot like my mother. In fact, the writer even has her same name!” He slid the magazine across the table at her, and she realized perhaps she had made a terrible mistake in judgement.

As an avid truth teller, Sam spit it out as quickly and efficiently as she could. “Because it is your mother. It was your mother’s cry for help long ago. It’s the reason she left your father.”

Raul’s thoughts spun as he took this shocking revelation in. The man who chased scoops had missed the biggest story of his life! And the girl he loved was the one who kept it from him. It was too much all at once.

His face warmed, and his eyes swelled. His throat dried, and his nose dripped. Before he could stop what society would have considered an abomination to the male species, Raul cried. Not just cried, but sobbed. Sam skirted around the table, sitting on the booth beside him, holding him, rocking him, feeling every bit of the heartbreak with him.

“I’m so sorry, Raul.”

“How do you have this?” he sputtered, tears slipping down his cheeks.

“I met your father Gabriel. He sat right there where you’re sitting.”

Raul placed his hands on the table, still crooked, still wobbling, and ran his palms down across the plastic booth, his fingertips drawing life from the cold, stiff fabric.

“I don’t understand. How did you find him?”

“He found me. He looked you up and came to see you once. After that, he wrote my advice column a couple months ago, and I recognized his name from the return address and wrote him back. That’s when he hoped to meet you, but first he wanted you to understand why he stayed away.”

Raul sat silent, as if waiting for the moral of the story. “And?”

“And your mother was the one who left him because she wasn’t mentally well. He didn’t want to make it worse for you, so he let her take you away from him, thinking she would be happier without him.”

“And you thought it would be better for me to find all of that out on a public forum like this?”

Sam had her quandaries about it, but when she really thought about it, Raul’s heart always leaned toward the benefit of mankind. If his mother’s story could help other women, she thought he would appreciate that their shared suffering wasn’t futile. That his mother wasn’t the sum of the darkness he knew, rather she was simply a light hidden. It was this compassion for others that made them so compatible, because Raul would always strive for the greater good. Even if it cost him much.

“I’m sorry, Raul. I thought maybe reading of her brokenness might first help you understand her… only after that could you talk about it, maybe even forgive her. And your dad too. I didn’t mean to make a headline out of your pain. I can see now that I made a grave blunder.”

Raul dried his eyes and sat stoic for a long moment. “Do you have his contact information?”

“I can give you his phone number and home address,” Sam offered, returning to her seat to find the contact information she had scribbled down and stuck in her purse. “He lives in New York, outside of the city. And I should tell you now that you also have a brother. Your dad adopted him.”

“Wow, I have a brother? So my dad was a pretty good guy, huh? At least that’s what my mom said about him in that journal entry.”

“Yes, he seemed genuine when I met him too. He sincerely wanted to make amends, Raul.” Sam handed him the yellow square Post-It note with his father’s address.

Reaching across their plates, Raul intertwined his fingers with hers as the table trembled below their elbows. “Sam, how do you know me so well?”

“Because I love you. When you love someone, you make the effort to know them.”

“Did you just tell me you love me?”

The ever-thinking Sam didn’t even need to think about it. “Yes, I did. And yes, I do.”

“I love you too.”

“Even after I lied to you? And kept your father a secret from you? Because I certainly wouldn’t love me if I did that to myself.”

“Good thing I’m a lot more forgiving than you are.” Raul released her hands, got up, and moved to her side of the booth. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to quit, Sam.”

“Quit what?”

“The magazine, the feud with Thomas Cook, all of it.”

Minnie Stanton could attest to one of Sam’s greatest flaws: Sam never quit. When her mother begged her to put aside her botany course and pick up beauty school instead, it only made Sam add on an agriculture class. And when Minnie took away her garden tools and handed her ballet slippers, it only forced Sam to start using serving spoons as shovels and forks as tillers. The point was, Raul should have known never to ask Sam to quit. It only made her more determined to press on.

“Why do you want me to quit now? I’ve come so far.”

“For the first time in my life I see something amazing up ahead. You and me together. Me and my dad reunited. And having a brother! I’ve never had a real family before, Sam, and it’s all right there. Right in front of me! But if I lose you… it’s gone. Thomas Cook attacked you personally. He destroyed your greenhouse, got you arrested, is launching a public smear campaign against you… and I’m worried about you. I’m worried he’s going to take it too far. He’s going to take you away from me.”

“He’s a three-piece-suited coward, Raul. He may fight dirty, but it’s not like he would hire a hitman to come after me.”

Even as Sam said it, she wasn’t so certain it was true. Thomas Cook showed zero conviction for the death toll his medicines caused.

“Come work with me for Fred Rogers. You’d love the guy! He’s all about kindness and understanding and all the principles you care so much about.”

“I don’t know…” Sam wavered. “My dreams are finally happening. My own advice column. A successful magazine. I even got a raise! Sure, it came with Mel as my boss, but I can’t have it all.” She paused. “You can’t ask me to give up when I finally did something no one else in my family could do.”

“What’s that?”

“For the first time in four generations, I survived the curse.”