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Stephen was sitting with his back to the door when I came in, but I still knew it was him. It wasn’t that I recognized him for his features, but he was the only person in that coffee shop wearing the other team’s colors, a dot of orange against a sea of blue and white. Add to that, he was the sort of person I would expect to be in my father’s orbit. He was the right age. My father would have been in his sixties had he lived, and Stephen looked to be about that. His hair was thick but white with small flecks of bygone youth lurking therein. More convincingly, however, Stephen carried himself the way my father did: with his shoulders back but chin down staring at some fiction book. Dad didn’t read nonfiction in public in case someone saw it as an invitation to a conversation about whatever subject the book was on. He spoke about that theory frequently, so I wasn’t surprised that his friend had a similar preference.
Knowing Stephen was distracted, I was careful when I walked up to him. “Dr. Cunningham?” I asked as sweetly as I could.
It was how my mother taught me to speak to older individuals, not directly, however. Rather than being a conscious lesson, it was just how she always did it. I saw how she handled herself as she went through the world, especially with the older people she knew from church. I saw this part of her and made it a part of me.
He looked up at me, seemingly surprised at my voice. But recognition slowly clicked. “You look like your dad,” he said as he shut his book.
I nodded. “I got that a lot when I was younger.”
And then the people who knew him left our lives either through a coffin or through distance. Then I stopped hearing it and realized that I actually missed hearing it. Life is weird. So are emotions.
I sat down across from him. He already had his coffee: a basic drip coffee that must have brought a great relief to the barista who could have something that looked like a break while it poured.
“Let me get you a drink,” he offered.
His voice still had a crispness to it that I wasn’t expecting. It made him seem younger than he was.
I waved him off. “I can order through the app and grab it at the counter.”
He studied me in the sort of steady and careful way a psychologist would study a patient. Though it might have been out of habit, the weight of his stare left me uneasy. I wasn’t his patient, after all. I had never agreed to this.
“Through an app?” he asked, to be sure of what I had just said.
I winced. The register didn’t have much of a line. It was just a couple of people, nothing anyone would have called unbearable by a reasonable standard. So why was I using technology?
“My payment information is stored in the app, and I get rewards points,” I said, smoothly.
It was a good cover because it was true on its own, but in reality, I didn’t want to play the game of “who should pay for the coffee” with him. I hate that game. Just let me pay! I can afford it! But there’s something almost if not outright political about it, especially in that situation. Did he have to pay as the godfather who was never there for me or did that responsibility get forfeited by virtue of his absence never being there for me? Maybe the imperative was strengthened by all the religious milestones–and the related gifts–he had missed. And that was already confusing, but did incomes matter? Presumably, he made more consistently because he had a steady career, and I was an author, which was a profession that was notorious for financial difficulties. However, I was an exception. Then there were the other details to consider like that I had invited him and he was doing me a favor by talking about my father, but at the same time, he had picked the place. Then again, he had come into what was effectively my home.
It was all overwhelming and a strong argument for my approach. But Stephen didn’t reply. The second’s many fractions ticked on a bit too long as I looked down at my phone and plugged in my usual order: a drip coffee with three shots of espresso, also known as a dead eye.
By the time I had finished, he had still said nothing. I was bothered.
“Is there a problem, Dr. Cunningham?”
With that, Stephen realized he was staring. “No,” he said, blinking rapidly and shaking his head. “Also just call me Stephen.”
No uncle, no other title of endearment or honor, just Stephen, I noted. Cool. That’s how this was going to go, I thought to myself, not great but not too poorly. As far as I was concerned, however, the way I referred to him was the least important part of this conversation. Mentally, he had already been a Stephen to me, but I was willing to be respectful of his degree and the effort that went into getting it. If he didn’t care, then fair enough. But that meant that we needed to move on to the next thing.
At that point, it was my turn to be silent, to hold the place for my initial question about a potential problem with me using an app and paying for my own damn beverage. His jaw clenched. It wasn’t all that visible, but a small twitch of a muscle gave it away. But as that muscle continued to twitch, Stephen scanned my face. He seemed to be looking for any sign that I was lying. But for once, I wasn’t. I raised an eyebrow, daring him while simultaneously regretting this meeting I thought I wanted. I thought I would feel confident during it. We were in this pseudo-womb of mine surrounded by people who would likely respond if I made a scene or called for help. So I was safe from direct harm, but there’s a type of damage that can come from being picked apart as intently as I was by a stranger who hadn’t consulted me first. And because of that, I didn’t feel so safe or confident. I felt just as unsettled as if I was on unfamiliar ground. Maybe the ground was stable. Maybe it was about to collapse. I couldn’t know. And no one had ever told me how to brace myself for something like this.
I was scared. Generally when I am scared, I am weak. But silence was a cloak I draped around myself whenever I felt the need to hide.
It forced Stephen to speak first. “That’s something your father would have done,” he finally confessed.
“Yeah, my dad was a big believer in tech.”
Part of me knew that was not what Stephen meant. I was Will Vogel’s daughter. I knew him better than anybody. Meaning, in so many words, that I knew what to hide or deemphasize like a desire to not talk to people when possible. But there was a time when Stephen was Will’s best friend. There was something to be said about the title, particularly when that title was wielded by my godfather who was already alluding to something no one else could have known about. The Vogels were private people, after all, especially in our dysfunctions.
Stephen sighed before he spoke. It was a small white flag, a taste of the surrender he would never offer in full. “But he would have also used it to avoid any sort of...” Stephen waved his hand as he paused “perceived conflict.”
“What conflict?” I asked. “I just don’t want to debate who should pay for my drink.”
“He didn’t like social etiquette, no.”
I felt my head fall in a tilt. It was not just caught on Stephen’s perfect guess but also a genuine confusion surrounding his skepticism of my point. Why would the arbitrarily designed social dances with complete strangers be the sort of thing worth getting worked up over? It didn’t make sense.
“Bit of a broad brush,” I hazarded. “Like there’s so many different guidelines on what to do in polite company that they inevitably conflict. So it’s not avoiding etiquette; it’s avoiding the debate around said etiquette or which is most relevant.”
There was an uneasy feeling crawling up my spine as I spoke. I wanted to shift my body to see if I might dislodge it, but I knew better. It would be taken as a sign of weakness or something like that. It was a sign that he was onto something, and that sign would encourage him to keep pushing. Which was the exact thing I didn’t want.
Stephen studied me, and I studied him right back. He didn’t know–couldn’t have known–that I had my fair share of therapist showdowns, and I thought I won them. It might have gotten me “fired” from therapy, but I was ready to call that a win because of the perceived safety that came from being allowed to sit in my dysfunction. The shift in his jaw muscles made me think his tongue moved up, not unlike how my former therapist put her tongue to her incisor tooth whenever I said something she found off-putting. It was a way of keeping the words in her mouth that she had no business saying. Or so I suspected, but of course, I never asked.
“You’re a lot like him,” Stephen said, as a way of closing that chapter and moving on to something else.
I nodded as if I could accept that, but I was not sure I could. It wasn’t an answer to the question I had asked, but it was a step to the more important issue that we needed to discuss.
“I get that a lot,” I said again.
He laughed. “From whom?”
“My mom.” I replied with a deadpan voice. “Obviously.”
He raised his eyebrows and tapped a hand on the table in front of him. “I just meant he didn’t have many friends when I knew him. I didn’t suspect that had changed.”
It hadn’t, I mentally answered, but I dared not say that aloud.
“For a while, he had you,” I pointed out. “Which leads to other questions. Why...”
I wasn’t sure how to phrase the question I had in mind, and even though I had practiced asking it, I never figured out how to word it. The pieces just didn’t fit together in the way I wanted them to. But if finding just the right arrangement of just the right words was really impossible, it was better to be blunt.
“I get that friends drift apart sometimes, but you were–or are–my godfather. I’d think there was some sort of...”
“Imperative to make it work?” he finished. “And here I was thinking we were avoiding any debate on etiquette.”
If it was his goal to make him dislike him, he had achieved it with ease already, and this continued jabbing seemed like wasted effort. But if he was going to twist my words, I could try to lace them with barbs of my own.
I asked, “Why did my dad ask you to be my godfather? Was it your stunning personality or unflinching sense of duty?”
Stephen sucked on his teeth. He felt the sting I had laid out. It took the words right out of his mouth.
Behind me, the barista called out my name. My coffee was ready. And I could tell from the barista’s face as I reached for my drink that a dead eye wasn’t a drink she was comfortable making. And I understood her discomfort. It was a whack of caffeine, but unfortunately, I needed said caffeine. I wasn’t sleeping well at night.
When I came back, Stephen knew what he wanted to say. “We were friends,” he admitted. “He said he would trust me with you which was not a sentiment he had for anyone else he knew.”
I could tell Stephen wanted to leave it there, but I couldn’t. This was too important. “Why?” I asked.
Stephen sighed. The slow, gradual exhale gave him a moment to piece together his words. Meanwhile, I tried to sip my coffee, but I could feel the strong heat coming off of it. As much as I wanted the caffeine, I had the sense to wait.
Finally, he explained, “When he asked me, you were already born. You were a girl in a world that was not kind to girls, as he said. Will was...”
“Prolific,” I finished. “I told a friend of mine that he was always a better philosopher than he was a lot of things.”
Stephen smiled softly, nodding his head. “That is a good way of describing him, but...”
He started to speak, but the thought went unfinished. It didn’t need to be finished. Dad’s insight on the plight of women was not only authored as a philosopher’s musing but also a confession, and I would spend my whole life worrying about the specifics.
“He thought you were different?” I half-asked, half-pointed out.
“Well, I’m gay.”
There were implications to that, I supposed, but I didn’t think so much about them. I simply laid out the thought as he was offering it. “So he picked you to be my godfather, after I was born, because I was a girl and you–as a gay man–didn’t pose the sort of traditional risk that was at the forefront of his mind.”
Stephen nodded.
“But if I was born a boy, do you think he would have asked you then?” I asked.
The question surprised me, but it had still come out. And once it did, I worried I might have caused him offense, given the implication. If he did, he said nothing. His expression remained unreadable.
“Probably,” he replied. “He would have just given me a different reason. Your father didn’t discriminate, really. Even back then, with the larger culture being what it was, my identity as a gay man never bothered him.”
Briefly, I thought back to the conversation in the car. I thought back to that half-veiled assurance of his love regardless of a thing about myself I wasn’t fully aware of yet. I didn’t like thinking about it, particularly in the presence of another, but there was something oddly validating about hearing Stephen confirm my dad’s thoughts on the subject.
“I know,” I muttered.
“Forgive the question,” Stephen started.
But I cut him off. “I won’t.”
“I didn’t mean–”
“Your intentions and effects are different things. Intentions are the least relevant part of it all,” I explained.
He smirked. “Did you come up with that?”
I shrugged. “It’s just something I always thought.”
“Because your dad used to say it.”
I went for another sip of coffee. It was still too hot for my lips, but I didn’t care. I needed the caffeine and the time I could get from taking a sip. There were feelings I had to quickly sort through before the conversation could continue. I didn’t know why I was so bothered by what he had just said. It was an innocent enough statement, but even still, I didn’t trust it. After all, he was the one saying it, and I wasn’t inclined to trust him.
“In any event,” Stephen said. “Yes, I think he would have. Because I suspected that one of the reasons he asked me wasn’t that I was the only one he could trust but that I was the only one really eligible in terms of the perceived closeness that such a request would require.”
This conversation had turned into a dance around a figurative fire. The heat nipped at my face as it warned me against getting too close. But Stephen was drawing closer and beckoning me to follow. I was struggling to resist. I knew that fire, and for some reason, I was confident that it couldn’t actually burn me.
“You’re saying you don’t think he had many friends.”
“Oh, I know he didn’t,” Stephen insisted.
I tapped my fingers against the tabletop. Once again, I brought no recorder. The notebook sat in my shoulder bag with a pen shoved into the wiring, waiting to be called upon. And in theory, the time had come. We were getting to the heart of the matter. But it was a familiar heart. There was nothing new or surprising about what he said, which left me wondering what specifically I had been hoping to hear.
Without an answer to that question, I didn’t know what to do besides let the conversation continue uninterrupted. So I pretended to be incredulous, tilting my head in a manner that would convey some confusion. “What made you say that?” I asked.
“He couldn’t keep any sort of relationship,” Stephen said with a shake of his head. “Not with a partner, with a friend, or his colleagues.”
Ellie’s face flashed in my mind. In that brief vision, she was smiling, and her eyes were lit up accordingly. But I tried to turn my mind’s eye away from it. After all, I knew there was something more malicious lurking beneath the surface, some realization that I was desperate to run from.
I tried to counter Stephen’s assertion. With a shake of my own head, I said, “I literally just talked to a coworker from an old job.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know him, probably. It would have been before your time. But his name is Sven?”
The name didn’t ring any bells for Stephen, but he wouldn’t admit as much right away. He labored over it before he fully committed to the conclusion. That pause halted the conversation. I hated silence. Stephen would have been accustomed to it, given his profession. He was waiting for my next question, and he was content to do so.
I sighed. “So... Okay, to establish the timeline. When we moved to Arizona, you and my dad drifted apart, right? That’s when you lost touch with us.”
Stephen leaned back in his seat. The gears were turning in his mind as he tried to remember exactly what happened over two decades ago. Finally, he nodded. “That sounds right, but things weren’t going great when he left.”
“Why?”
“Well, I didn’t find out you all were moving to Arizona until the week before you did it,” he said.
Shocked, I asked, “What? Was the move that sudden? Mom had said it was a work transfer. Dad had known about it for a while.”
“Oh, he knew, but he didn’t tell me, which was absolutely infuriating. And I don’t think he told your eldest sister either. And it wasn’t a work transfer. Your darling, conflict-avoidant mother probably just said as much thinking it was easier than telling you the truth, lest it get back around to your two sisters.”
I fell back into my chair, hand clutching the coffee. The heat seeped into me through the cardboard sleeve. I’d never heard that part of the story before.
“I don’t understand.” I choked out.
Stephen grimaced, a slight acknowledgement of his mistake. “From what I understand, his second wife was moving out there with your sister. Hence your mother’s concerns that it would cause tension between the two of them.”
I flinched at the mention of Charity. Stephen didn’t seem to notice.
He went on, undeterred. “It was some legal issue. The court had given his ex-wife permission to move to Arizona for some reason or another. I don’t know the specifics. Your father never explained it well. But for him to get what he wanted, he had to move out there as well.”
My mind spun. “Yeah, I’m sure he wanted his rights to Charity. And we saw her all the time when I was growing up. Or the typical every other weekend sort of thing.”
Stephen hummed but said nothing.
“You don’t believe me?”
He kept the muscles of his face still when he replied, “It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s something I’ve noticed working in this field. Some men only want custody to pay less child support. And if she were living in a completely different state, though I’m not aware of the tendencies of Arizona’s family courts, I’d imagine his payments would have gone up.”
I knew what he was talking about. I had friends who were pawns in those sorts of custody battles. I saw the aftermath more than I saw the fighting itself, but that was enough to understand.
“You said he didn’t tell Leah? Or you?”
Stephen grimaced but nodded.
In my mind, I was scrambling for some sort of defense. After all, I had thrown together a move without telling a dear friend of mine. But that was different. It wasn’t across the county. And the relocation wasn’t the main problem. My inability to hold a conversation was.
“I never confronted him about it,” Stephen said, preempting my next question. “Honestly, he was more than capable of disappearing wordlessly, so at the time, I thought I should be grateful for what I did have.”
“What made you think that?”
Stephen sighed. “I was never all that sure. He made an interesting psychology study.”
With a wince, I pointed out, “Pretty sure it’s unethical to pick apart people you know without their permission but go on.”
He hummed, catching the stinger in my words that I definitely meant for him to feel. “At that point in our six-year friendship, he had already proven he had this pattern of implosion, as I thought of it. He’d be fine with you, talk to you regularly, ask about the partner, kids, parents, all of that. He’d remember to send flowers at the right occasion, loan you a hundred bucks if you needed it, but then would come the unprompted radio silence. He’d disappear for weeks on end, in fact. You’d think he was having some sort of mental break, but he was fine. ‘Just had something else to do.’”
“What other things?” I asked softly.
“No, you don’t understand. That was how he worded it. ‘I just had something else to do,’ he would say. Never clarified what those other things were.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “For what it’s worth, he was never like that with me.”
“I did also notice that he could be a good parent, though.”
But bad at everything else, I finished. I took another sip of my drink. The temperature was slightly more bearable now. “A good parent doesn’t move away from their oldest kid with hardly any notice.”
I tapped my fingers on the cup. I didn’t have any more questions for him. I’d heard enough. None of it was useful to me. All of it had hurt me in one way or another. But he had come all this way. And while the football game might have been his main reason for coming to this particular part of the American Midwest, he had still ventured out to this coffee shop for me. I wanted it to be worth something to him. I wanted him to walk away thinking he had really given me something. Maybe not an epiphany but some grand moment I would cherish and value, not one that would haunt my nightmares (although if it replaced THE nightmare, then that was technically a win).
I looked down at the cup. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when he died right after it happened.”
“It’s understandable,” Stephen tried to say.
“It’s understandable when a death notification takes ten years?”
“You didn’t know who I was or where I was,” he clarified in his therapist voice.
Up until that conversation I didn’t think I hated the specific tone of voice I had associated with therapists when they do their therapy-thing. But when he said that, the resentment I didn’t know was there rose up in my throat.
“I didn’t know who you were because you never tried to connect with me,” I pointed out. “Social media existed.”
He leaned back. From that, I couldn’t tell if my demand was too great.
I kept arguing. “I know you aren’t my father, but you agreed to some sort of commitment.”
“I never got on those sites,” he admittedly. “Some of my clients who were on them were finding it destructive. I took it as a cautionary tale.”
“You didn’t have any clients that had a good experience with social media? You know something to counteract the bad, make you think that being able to reconnect with people was kind of cool?”
He shook his head. “I’ve found that when we drift apart from people, it’s not without reason.”
“I’ve found the opposite but okay.”
“You’ve never let a bad friend go?” he asked.
I am the bad friend, I thought, but I couldn’t say that. “I’ve drifted away from high school or college friends that were great people, we got along great, and everything, but life took us in two completely different directions. Time zones are rough.”
He nodded. “Time zones can be rough, but if you were both–or if all of you, rather–were happy with how things ended up then didn’t drifting apart save you from the trouble of trying to navigate said time zones.”
“Cart and horse,” I quickly replied.
“How?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. “But what was the point in letting me drift away?”
He flinched. “There wasn’t one,” he admitted. “You were just collateral damage.”
I could hear the premise he didn’t utter aloud. But all the same, I needed him to say it. “What was the point in letting my dad drift away?”
“I couldn’t deal with it anymore,” he admitted without hesitation or uncertainty.
“Deal with what? The moving stunt?”
“The everything.”
Another knife got plunged in my heart from that remark. I masked my reaction behind more coffee. Visible signs of hurt were blood in the water to these psychoanalytical types.
He forced a smile onto his face, but as if he remembered something, his face fell. “I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. I really am.”
I shook my head. After all that he said, I didn’t believe him when he professed a sentiment that required some sort of emotional connection or investment. It didn’t matter that his eyes looked sincere; as far as I was concerned, he didn’t have the ability to mean what he said.
Stephen leaned forward and passionately argued, “Mia, I wanted him to get therapy. To address his issues. He used to make one off remarks about a troubled home life or childhood, and I didn’t think he should be dealing with that burden anymore. I didn’t want him to drop it off in the grave.”
While his words made sense, there was still something disingenuous about them. I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t explain why I didn’t. I just didn’t. However, I could pretend to go along with what he was saying to keep the peace. I nodded, trying to muster up something like a convincing performance.
His smile came back. “I was excited to hear from you though. I think about you from time to time. I visited your mother in the hospital when she had you, you know?”
I didn’t.
“And, um...” He was getting choked up. I didn’t think it was justifiable considering how little of my life he was in. He didn’t watch me grow up. He saw a baby, caught a glimpse of an almost toddler, and then had an adult reach out to him out of the blue. The latter part was entirely the product of his choices. “I knew,” he swore, “I knew you had so much potential. I could see it in your eyes. They were already sparkling at a few days old. You were watching everyone and everything. You had the sort of curiosity that an artist needs.”
He exhaled with ease. My lungs tightened at the sound.
“It bothered me,” he confessed, that I didn’t get to see you grow up.”
“It was your choice,” I whispered.
Stephen shook his head. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“So if my dad had reached out to you,” I started.
“He sent pictures,” Stephen said. “For the first couple years after you guys left. But that stopped years before he died.”
“But you still kept your distance?” I finished.
“Until he addressed his issues, I had to hold firm to that boundary.”
The last word bothered me. It was what my therapist had suggested with Ellie and my mother. When it came to my mother, the point was valid. When it came to Ellie, it sounded absurd. Because boundaries–while they make sense as a concept–were the sort of thing I saw myself being the recipient of more than the creator of. I always expected to be on the wrong side of the line. Case in point: Stephen’s boundaries that looked so much like abandonment.
“I hope,” Stephen said, “that this is going to be a restart for the two of us. I know I wasn’t there for you growing up or during your religious milestones.”
“Honestly, the idea of you being there for my sacraments is probably a loaded one for you,” I said. “So that absence also could have been seen as a matter of survival, right?”
Stephen winced. For the first time in our conversation, I could see that he was genuinely uncomfortable. It was clear why. The intersection between religion and sexual orientation is a difficult one to navigate, and no one should do it for someone else. I pushed the point too hard. In the silence of Stephen’s sharp intake of breath, there was room for an apology. I did not offer one.
“I mean to say,” he went on, “I could have been there for you when you were growing up. Especially when your father died. And I wasn’t. I’m sorry for that. Genuinely.”
There was something earnest about his words. I could faintly hear it, but it was not the sort of sound I was willing to recognize. It didn’t matter to me that he wanted to be in my life. He may have had every intention of being there for me when he agreed to the role. But intentions and effects are completely different things. And I could deal with the effects however I saw fit. They were mine. Maybe they weren’t initially, but they had been given to me.
When we parted ways, kick off was looming, and the coffee shop–along with most campus spots–was clearing out. It had been years since I went to a game myself, but while I wasn’t sure what all went into getting into the stadium, I knew it was a trial to do. So I had to let him go. He had to agree to it. But as we parted ways, Stephen hugged me tightly. It felt like a father’s embrace, which only left me feeling more confused. For all my father’s problems, he never chose to leave me. Death had to claw him away. Stephen had let me slip away.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he said.
And I agreed. Because I wouldn’t be a stranger. I could never be. I’d always be his goddaughter, discarded or not. So I let him walk away without reminding him of how this story was going to end. After all, this was the second time this story was being told. He’d lived it once with my father, and now, we were going for round two. I didn’t want round two. I wanted a different story where I didn’t end up standing alone with my broken heart in my hands as everyone who cared about me took turns walking out of my life. But the only thing I had learned that day was my fate and how inevitable it was.