I was having dinner with my sister, Ellen, again, I had brought frosted brownies from the Vons bakery, which she wouldn’t eat. She always asks me to bring dessert and then she tries not to eat it because of the calories.
“So how’s work?” I asked her, dipping a fork into the brownie pan. My sister was a lawyer.
“Are you going to eat that whole thing?” Ellen asked me. “Don’t you want to put it on a plate?”
“I might eat the whole thing. I’ve done it before, and nothing bad happened,” I said.
“I hate to think how much fat is in that.”
I got a knife out of a drawer and cut a corner piece. “So how’s work?” I asked again. My sister hated her job, and usually we avoided this topic.
“Work is the same as ever, busy and complicated. Why?”
“I was just wondering what kind of stuff you’re working on. What kind of cases do you have right now?”
“The usual stuff. You know, a little carpal tunnel, some back injuries. A neck thing. Why? Did you get injured at work? Do you need representation?”
“No, not that. I was just wondering if you ever had any of those cases where, like, a mother of a kid sues the father, even though they were never married and maybe he didn’t even know about the kid.”
My sister froze and looked at me. “Uh…,” she said. “You know I don’t do that kind of thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I did know that.”
“So… are you trying to tell me something? Is someone—did something happen?”
I didn’t say anything. I swallowed because my throat suddenly felt thick and tight.
“Tom?” she said. “What’s going on?”
I looked up at her and still didn’t say anything.
“Is somebody suing you?” Her eyes narrowed. She was willing to go to battle for me; I knew that.
I shook my head. “No.” The word came out as if someone had both hands around my throat.
She waited, just sitting there, not saying anything, just like a therapist would. There were all these dishes piled up all over the table, and I looked at them, as if I were taking inventory.
“I think I have a kid,” I said. “Kevin told me. There was this girl. Woman. I was seeing her for a while. A long time ago. She left. She moved. Now she’s, you know, back. In San Diego. And I think she had, you know, I think we—”
“OK, OK,” Ellen said. “So she hasn’t contacted you directly. It’s just that Kevin said—what did Kevin say?”
“He said she had a ten-year-old boy who looks exactly the way I looked in fifth grade.”
“Oh,” she said, thinking. “OK. Well.”
“Well, it’s good that she hasn’t asked me for anything,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s a good sign?”
“I guess it is.” She nodded slowly. “I guess it could be. Wait. What do you mean? A good sign of what?”
“I meant that if she hasn’t contacted me, he’s probably not my kid?” I was asking her, not telling her.
She sat there for a minute or two. “I guess it might mean that.”
We both waited for one of us to talk again. I decided it wouldn’t be me.
Ellen didn’t speak for a long time. Then she took the knife from my side of the table and cut the opposite brownie corner from the one I had cut. She got up and got a plate and a fork. She sat down and started on her brownie. “Do you want to get in touch with her?” Ellen said.
“Me? What? Why would I… Not if, no—I—I honestly don’t know what to do.”
“Sounds like you have time to think it over, if she hasn’t come to you to ask for anything.”
I waited until Ellen put down her brownie fork before I stood up. I started clearing the dishes, my job. Ellen was taking stuff off the table, putting it into the fridge. I rinsed the dishes, put them into the dishwasher.
“What was she like?” Ellen wanted to know.
“Who?” I could be really annoying. Ellen must have wanted to slug me sometimes, but she never did. I knew I was being annoying, and I did nothing to stop myself.
“The woman,” Ellen said. “You dated.”
I let a glass fill up with water.
My sister let out a gust of frustration. Then she said, “The woman who might’ve had your child! Who do you think I’m talking about?”
“Diana. That’s her name. She was, she was blond and small. She had freckles and—”
“Cut it out. Personality. What was her personality like?”
“Nice,” I said. “She was nice.”
She mimed tugging a rope out of my stomach, like it was a huge effort to haul any information out of me.
“Kind of, you know, independent. Smart. Stubborn. She liked to do things her way.”
“How long were you together?”
“Not long. A few months. This was ages ago, so a lot of it is—”
“I understand. I think you should take some action. Right away.”
I looked at her. My sister doesn’t usually tell me what to do. She’s more the whatever-feels-right-for-you type.
I finished the plates and glasses. I picked up a sponge and started wiping the counters. “What kind of action were you thinking? Just for example,” I said. But now it had been so long since she said the thing about taking action that her thoughts had probably moved on to something else. “You said I should take some action. About the woman? Diana?”
“No—I know what you’re talking about, Tom. I’m just thinking. Well, you know, nothing complicated. Get in touch. Call her,” Ellen said. “Talk to her?”
“Just like that? Out of the blue? I don’t want to freak her out.”
“Fine. OK. Then ask Kevin to ask her if it’s OK to give you her phone number. That way she can say no if she wants to. She gets some warning. And you get to test the waters.”
“But if she’s in the phone book, then it’s OK to just call. I mean, anybody can call, right? It’s, you know, public information if it’s listed. It’s not an invasion of anybody’s privacy if you look up a number and dial it. Is it?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. But you just said you didn’t want to freak, her out.”
“I don’t.”
“But OK, if she’s listed, you could just call.”
“If I go through Kevin, then I have to deal with him giving me his opinion and lectures and who knows what all.”
“I see what you mean.”
“I’ll write her a note!” I said.
“Good, idea.”
“What should I say?”
“Tom!” She exhaled as though she were fed up with the questions, but I knew she could handle it. My sister had a lot of patience, and I gave her plenty of opportunities to put it to use. “Say you heard from Kevin that she had moved back here. Say you were wondering if she would please get in touch with you, that you’d like to talk to her.”
I nodded. “What if she says no?”
“If she says no, we’ll think up a Plan B.”
I smiled at her. I knew Ellen would help me. I loved Ellen.
• • •
At home, I looked around for something to write the note on. I had a lined yellow pad that I wrote songs on. I found a pen. I wrote:
Dear Diana,
Kevin told me that you had moved back into the area. I was wondering if you could give me a call sometime. I’d like to talk to you.
Then I put my phone number. I signed my name. Under it, I wrote, “P.S. Please call!!” I looked at it. Wrong. The note was OK until the P.S., which ruined it. I tore off the page and started over. I thought I’d make it a little more informative.
You will not be surprised to hear that I am still working at The Club.
Wait. Why wouldn’t she be surprised? Was I assuming that she thought I was in exactly the same place as when she left? Plenty of people had the same job. That was stability, which could be a good thing, a positive character trait. I guess it made a difference what the job was. If you taught high school for seventeen years, then you were a stable, contributing member of society, somebody making a difference. I pictured a small boy watching me work. I looked like a TV character somehow, wiping down the bar, making drinks, watching the band onstage. If he had been born the day I started the job, he would be almost finished with high school now. OK, I didn’t have to mention the job. It wasn’t the whole story about me. I did other things. Bartending didn’t define me, after all. It was what I did, not who I was. I did not need to explain to Diana or anybody why I was still doing it.
I rewrote the note:
Dear Diana,
I hear you’re back in the area. Please give me a call.
Good.
I looked it over. I flipped to a clean page.
Diana—
Call me.
Good
I put my phone number at the bottom. I found an envelope and wrote Diana’s name on it. I looked up the address of the school Kevin’s daughter went to and found a stamp. I walked down to the corner to put it in the mailbox so that I wouldn’t chicken out after a good night’s sleep.
When I got back from the mailbox, my place looked different, as if someone had tampered with it while I was out. It wasn’t that anything was missing or had been added. It was just that it seemed to have shrunk. And the lamp shade over by my bed had a tear I hadn’t seen before. The paint on the walls had gotten dingy. Wasn’t it a lot whiter just a few minutes ago? I looked into the refrigerator and found no real food and some dried up brown spills on the shelves. My phone looked old-fashioned, like something an eldery person might cling to, insisting that it worked fine. My television was a black-and-white Kenmore that I’d grabbed off my parents’ Salvation Army pile years ago, I really ought to throw that thing away. The antenna was broken off, and replaced with a straightened hanger. It was too much trouble to keep one hand on the hanger to improve its reception, so I never watched it. The clothes I’d left in a heap on a chair seemed like a random assortment of nondescript rags. The windows were dirty. An old flowered comforter, one of my mother’s castoffs, lay in a jumbled mess on the bed. The place looked—I had a startling stab in my chest with this thought—like a crazy person lived here and had for a long time.
I brushed my teeth and got in bed quickly. I wrapped my funky old comforter all around myself as if I were making a cocoon. I pulled it over my head, a hood. Then I closed my eyes, and I was gone.