One
IT’S THE LAST Friday night in August, and instead of dancing on a table at Melanie Jaffin’s party with the rest of the soon-to-be junior class, I am crouched behind a tower of Meow Mix in the pet-food aisle of Shop-Co, watching my mother hyperventilate.
This is not new. Whenever we travel the fifteen miles from Elmherst, the town where we live, to North Haven, the town where my mom grew up—the only town with decent shopping—we risk running into someone she knew in high school, and we risk her wigging out. Right now she is sliding cat food around on a shelf so she can peer into the next aisle at whoever it is we’re trying to avoid. Classic.
As I crouch, I make a mental list of everything I need for school: three-ring binders, loose leaf, printer paper, pens . . . some of those highlighter markers. . . . I know I’m forgetting something, but I can’t think of what.
My mother whirls around, bumping a bunch of Fancy Feast off a shelf. The cans careen down the aisle, like they’re trying to get away from her.
“Mom?” I say. “Are you OK?”
She manages to look both crazy and adorable at the same time: blue eyes wide; tousles of blonde hair fluffing out every which way. It’s the same hairstyle she’s had since she was my age. She’s always saying she needs to change it—grow it out, dye it red, something—but she never does.
“Mom,” I say again, louder.
“Oh, God, Josie.”
“What?” I say. Then, “Who is it?”
She shakes her head, like the name is too horrible to utter.
OK, now I have to look. Peering through the cat-food tunnel, I wonder who it will be. A bitchy former cheerleader? Or that math-geek guy we ran into at the recycling center a few months ago—the one in the Phish T-shirt and clogs—who made some lame joke about quadratic equations? He was cute, in a nerdy sort of way. When I pointed this out later, my mom told me about the time she barfed on his desk in trigonometry. I said, That was a lifetime ago; he probably forgot. And she said, No one forgets the pregnant girl, Josie.
Well, my mom doesn’t have to worry tonight. Whoever she is hiding from is gone. All I see is some tall, silver-haired couple, arguing about shampoo. He wants the Pert Plus; she says the store brand is a better value. He doesn’t like the smell of the store brand; she says they smell exactly the same. Now she is unscrewing caps, holding up bottles, forcing him to sniff.
“The coast is clear,” I tell my mom. “See? Just a couple of fogies fighting over hair products—and look, they’re leaving. . . . Now can we get my stuff? You said this could be a quick stop, and I want to get to Mel’s party before—”
“Josie,” she says.
“Uh-huh.” This whole time I’ve been trying to remember the other thing I need, and suddenly it comes to me. Staples! “Don’t let me forget staples,” I say, squatting to retrieve a can of Fancy Feast and return it to its shelf. “Binders, printer paper, pens—”
“Josie.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re Paul’s parents.”
“What?” I grab another can, place it on the shelf.
“The couple with the shampoo. They’re Paul Tucci’s parents.”
Paul Tucci.
The name zings through the air and impales me like an arrow. For a moment I can’t breathe because . . . well, because sixteen-plus years ago Paul Tucci got my mother pregnant. With me. He was a senior, she was a junior, and I was the size of a cocktail shrimp when his dad got transferred to a company in Arizona, and—even though Paul knew he had a kid in the making—he moved all the way across the country, and my mom never heard from him again.
It’s the perfect Lifetime Television movie. Boy and Girl meet, fall in love, have sex; Girl gets pregnant; Boy falls off the face of the earth. Call me cynical, but from everything I know about Paul Tucci, it’s hard to imagine a different ending.
I was in fifth grade the first time I asked my mom what happened. Up until then I had just accepted her vaguest of possible explanations: “You do have a father, Josie. He just lives in Arizona.” But in fifth grade, I really asked. It was the night of the Spring Fling, this father-daughter dance at my school, and even though several of my friends’ fathers had offered to bring me along too, I didn’t want to get all dolledup to drink punch and pretend to have fun fox-trotting with somebody else’s dad. So I stayed home on the couch, eating popcorn with my mom. When I brought up the name Paul Tucci, she choked. Literally. She choked on a popcorn kernel, like the mere mention of his name caused her physical distress. But she tried to answer my questions. Questions like, Why did he go AWOL? Does he have any shred of human decency? And, hello, isn’t he even the least bit curious about how his kid turned out?
Here is what she told me the night of the Spring Fling. Here are the facts, according to Kate Gardner:
Paul Tucci was a Big Deal in high school. Captain of the basketball team; top tenth percentile of his class; destined for greatness. (Kate Gardner was, in her own words, “destined for homecoming court and a job at the mall.”) Paul Tucci’s parents were Ivy League educated, as were his two older brothers. (Kate Gardner’s parents hadn’t gone to college.) The Tuccis had country club memberships. Seats on the town council. A ski condo in Waterville Valley and a beach house on the North Carolina coast. (The Gardners had none of these things—things that Kate’s mother liked to refer to as “trappings of the rich and snooty.”) The only thing Paul’s parents and Kate’s parents had in common, apparently, was their belief that no matter how in love Paul and Kate might be, they had no business dating each other.
But date they did. Against their parents’ wishes. Behind their parents’ backs.
To my fifth-grade self, of course, this sounded like the most romantic thing ever. Like Romeo + Juliet, the Leonardo DiCaprio version. I loved it that Paul Tucci and my mom were rebels. I loved it that when my mom found out she was pregnant, she and Paul decided not to tell anyone. They would keep the news to themselves for as long as they could—their little secret. But then, just like Romeo and Juliet, there was an unexpected plot twist: Paul’s dad got transferred.
I hate unexpected plot twists.
I hate it that the Tuccis had to move to Arizona.
I hate it that—unlike Romeo—Paul Tucci turned out to be a spineless wanker who didn’t have the guts to tell my mom about his new, not-so-pregnant, Arizona girlfriend. My mom had to find out the hard way, from Paul’s best friend, Sully. On top of that, she had to tell her parents she was pregnant, drop out of high school junior year, and raise a baby.
Whenever I think about it, I get mad. Mad that Paul Tucci got off so easy. And, while I don’t mean to imply that what happened was my mom’s fault in any way—Paul Tucci is clearly a negligent boobthat I don’t even consider my father—I can’t help but think that she could have tried a little harder to track him down and at least make him pay child support.
OK, I admit it. I am just the teeniest bit biased against Fathers Who Completely Shirk Their Parenting Responsibilities. Whenever I see one of those Dateline exposés about some deadbeat dad whose five kids are living in a trailer park eating moldy bread crusts while he’s living it up in his high-rise apartment scarfing down filet mignon, it really gets to me. I mean, who do these guys think they are?
But in sixteen years, my mother has never asked Paul Tucci for anything. Not money, not even an explanation, and believe me there’s a lot to explain. I have a thousand questions for him, if he ever decides to show up on our doorstep, begging to answer them. Needless to say he hasn’t. Instead, on this random Friday night all these years later, his parents just materialize out of the ether. In the middle of Shop-Co.
No wonder my mom is hyperventilating.
Here we stand, the two of us, frozen in the pet-food aisle. And we don’t even have a pet.
Carts roll by. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. A voice announces a special on rotisserie chickens. Only $5.99!Pick one up tonight! Are Paul Tucci’s parents on their way to the deli counter right now to pick up a hot, juicy rotisserie chicken? It’s a real bargain. Why not get two? Why not buy the whole—
“I can’t . . . believe they’re here,” my mother says. “How . . . are they here?” Her voice sounds high and squeaky, like a Muppet’s. “Josie?” She is looking at me expectantly, as if I have the answers.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “What I do know is we need to pick up these cans. OK? Can you help me with that?”
My best friend, Liv, likes to point out that whenever my mom starts acting like a kid, I start acting thirty-three. Liv says it’s warped. I say it’s the only way to survive in an emergency. Daughter gives instructions; mother follows. Grab a can; put it on a shelf. Grab a can; put it on a shelf.
When we’re finished, she looks at me again.
“OK,” I say. “We are going to get school supplies. After that, we are going to pay for them. And then you are going to drive me to Mel’s party.” I reach over to yank up the waistband of her jeans so her underwear stops showing. “OK?”
She nods.
“And if we happen to see Paul Tucci’s parents on the way, we are not going to freak, we are just going to keep walking, like we have no idea who they are. . . . Got it?”
She nods again.
“It’s going to be OK,” I add, because she seems to need the assurance.
The funny thing is, she’s not like that. Ninety percent of the time, my mother is this amazingly smart, capable, beautiful, confident person. She doesn’t cower behind cat food; she manages a bookstore. She reads The New York Times. She runs four miles every morning. My friends love her. A couple of them kind of worship her, actually. You do not want to play Scrabble with her, because she will kick your ass seven ways to Sunday with words you have never heard before. My mom is . . . well, she’s just a great person, no matter what anyone who knew her in high school may think.
“See?” I say, as we’re exiting the school-supplies aisle and rolling our cart toward the checkout. “Mission accomplished. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
By this point, my mother has relaxed into a yogalike calm. She’s breathing normally. Her skin has regained its pinkish hue. Crisis avertedis what I’m thinking.
Then, we see them again.
“Oh, God, Josie.”
Paul Tucci’s parents are in the checkout line, maybe thirty feet ahead of us.
“Oh, God. Shit.”
She’s regressing. And frankly, I don’t think I’m up for Round Two. I don’t want to spend another hour hiding out in, say, the feminine-hygiene aisle. I want to go to Melanie’s party and dance on a table. Not literally. I’m not much of a table dancer. But the point is, I want to go and have fun with my friends. Because it’s Friday night, and I’m sixteen years old, and I should be whooping it up, not holding my mother’s hand while she has a breakdown.
“Shit, Josie. Shit.”
But here is the thing: She would do it for me. She has done it for me, a million times. She has rubbed my back while I’ve cried. She has held my hair while I’ve puked. When Marcus Weiner called me Turbo Tits in seventh grade, she took me out for ice cream and helped me craft a dozen witty come-backs. My mom has always been my greatest ally in times of crisis, even if she thought I was being a drama queen, even if she would rather have been doing something else at the time. And that is a beautiful thing. That is why, with all the daughterly love I can summon, I am now asking my mom to please remove her fingernails from my arm and hand me her wallet.
“What?” she says.
“Your wallet. Give it to me. I’ll pay and meet you at the car.”
“But . . . what if they . . .”
Her voice peters out, but I can tell what she was trying to say, and it almost makes me laugh. “It’s not like they’ll recognize me. They don’t even know I exist.”
As far as we know, this is true. As far as we know, Paul Tucci moved to Arizona without telling a single person what he left behind.
“Right.” My mother smites her forehead. “Good point.” And she hands me her wallet.
Of all the checkout lines, I had to plant myself behind Paul Tucci’s parents. I just couldn’t help myself. And now my heart is thumping against my tonsils.
Hi, I’m Josephine Gardner. You don’t know me, but your son knocked up my mom.
No.
I’m Josie, your long-lost granddaughter.
No. These people aren’t my grandparents, not really. The way I see it, I only have—had—one set of grandparents. My mom’s parents, Homer and Eloise Gardner, whose house we now live in. They died when I was four, one after the other, from cancer. But I still remember little things. The way my grandfather smelled, like gin and butterscotch candies. And the wigs my grandmother wore—each one as dark and sleek as a panther pelt—to cover up her nearly hairless head. She kept them in a perfumed drawer in her closet. Sometimes she let me try them on.
Paul Tucci’s mother’s hair is metallic gray—a chin-length bob, parted on one side. Her shirt is crisp and white, but her khakis sag at the butt like a seventh-grade boy’s. I would suggest a belt, but she’d probably slap my wrist the way she just slapped Paul’s father’s wrist when he tried to take a York Peppermint Pattie off the candy rack. “Put that back!” she told him. “No sweets!”
And he actually obeyed.
This shouldn’t bother me—I don’t even know these people—but still, who made her the queen? And come on, it’s a Peppermint Pattie, not a crack pipe.
Maybe the issue is weight. Mr. Tucci is a big guy—not fat, exactly, but oxlike. Wide back, massive shoulders, huge tendony hands that can palm melons. Literally, this is what he’s doing, palming two honeydews and holding them straight out in front of him like he’s Michael Jordan. Or Frankenstein.
He’s showing off a little, but Paul Tucci’s mother doesn’t seem to notice. She’s too busy eyeballing the girl behind the counter—the one with the shaved head and the lip ring and the world’s supply of black eyeliner. When the girl opens her mouth, you can see the stud in her tongue. “How’re you folks doin’ tonight?” she asks, friendly as can be.
Paul Tucci’s mother gives her an icy “We’re fine.”
“Did you bring bags?”
“Shop-Co doesn’t provide bags?”
“We do. We just try not to use them if we can help it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The girl juts her chin in my direction. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”
Now all eyes are on me—me and my canvas bags, which everyone I know carries. If you live within a fifty-mile radius of Elmherst, Massachusetts, you don’t have a choice. Keep Elmherst a Clean, Green Scene isn’t just a bumper sticker, it’s a commandment.
But that’s not really the point here. The point is, Paul Tucci’s parents are looking at me, and I can feel my eyelid start to twitch—a little problem of mine whenever I get nervous.
Why am I nervous? To Paul Tucci’s parents I am no one—just your average teenage girl in a Red Sox cap, virtually indistinguishable from any other teenage girl who might be buying school supplies tonight. So what if I have the same color eyes as them? A lot of people do. Brown eyes are a dominant trait. I learned that last year in bio, when we did a genetics unit.
Anyway, they’ve stopped looking at me. Mrs. Tucci is muttering under her breath to no one in particular that the whole world is turning into a hippie colony. It never used to be this way. Nobody used to care what kind of bags you used. Blah, blah, blah.
I would like to put a bag over her head.
Mr. Tucci doesn’t say a word. He just pats her crisp white shoulder. Pat-pat-pat. As in, There, there, honey. Everything’s going to be OK.
Is he used to her behavior, immune after so many years of marriage? I’m curious. Surely he knows she’s being a jackass. Does he not mind?
It’s an enigma to me, how two people can stay together. Despite their flaws, despite their most annoying habits. I don’t get it, maybe because most of my friends’ parents are divorced. Maybe because—with the exception of Paul Tucci—my mom has never dated anyone for more than a month. Maybe because the only “boyfriend” I’ve had was in eighth grade. Dan Applegate. We were together for thirteen days. He broke up with me in gym class—correction, his friends broke up with me in gym class. “Dan wants to see other people” is what they said, which was fine with me. I was perfectly content not getting felt up in the baseball dugout after school, preferring to lie on the couch in Liv’s den watching VH1 Behind the Musicand eating raw cookie dough.
So it’s weird, seeing Paul Tucci’s parents. Forget us being related, I mean the way they function as a couple. She orders; he obeys. She bitches; he pats. And somehow they manage to purchase three canvas bags, pack up their stuff, and stroll out of Shop-Co together, arm in arm.
“Josie! Where have you been?!”
Liv is standing on Melanie Jaffin’s pool table.
“I’ve been waiting for you, like, forever!”
She is wearing a black feather boa, a red velvet smoking jacket, and a bikini.
“This place is insane! Did you see Michael Palamino?! No brain cells left! Seriously! Bumbling idiot! Get up here with me!”
Liv, stone-cold sober, starts Riverdancing to Eminem, and she couldn’t care less what anyone in Mel’s basement thinks. This is why I love her.
I have known Liv since we were six years old, when we first met on the swings at our neighborhood playground. She introduced herself as Olivia Sarah Weiss-Longo, told me she had two daddies, and said my hair looked like Snow White’s. How could we not be best friends?
“I need to talk to you!”I’m screaming because it’s the only way to be heard. The music is so, so loud.
Liv leaps off the pool table. “Is everything OK? Are you—wait!” She grabs my hand. “Follow me!”
As we wind our way through the bodies, I notice how good everyone looks tonight, tan and happy. Lots of people stop to hug us and scream things like, “OHMYGODYOU-GUYS! HOW WAS YOUR SUMMER?! CAN YOU BELIEVE WE’RE JUNIORS?!” Rob Vantine decides it’s his mission in life to get us to drink the punch he made, with the orange slices floating on top, and the mango chunks stuck to the bottom. And, oh yeah, a gallon or two of vodka.
We graciously decline.
And press on.
Finally we make it to the upstairs bathroom, where every surface is coated with shaving cream. Yup; it’s that kind of party. Melanie’s father, who bought this lake house after he ditched Melanie’s mother for his twenty-four-year-old paralegal, and who only gets to see Mel every third weekend, feels so guilty he lets her do whatever she wants.
“Huh,” Liv says, looking around the bathroom. “Impressive.” Then, being the fantastic friend that she is, she grabs a towel to mop the shaving cream off the side of the tub so we can sit. “So, what’s up?”
“Well,” I say, “there’s been a Tucci sighting.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“WHAT?”
“I know,” I say. And tell her everything.
When I’m finished, my feather-boa-wearing, pool-table-hopping, Riverdancing best friend puts her hand on my arm. “Holy shite, Josie.” (Liv prefers “shite” to “shit.” She thinks it makes her sound British.)
“I know,” I say.
“Do you think they moved back?”
“What?” I shake my head. “No. I’m sure they’re just visiting old friends or something.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know they’re visiting old friends?”
“I don’t know. They seemed . . . I mean, all they bought was shampoo and honeydews, and milk, and, like, toilet scrubbers—”
“Toilet scrubbers? ”
“Yeah. So?”
Liv raises an eyebrow. “When was the last time you bought toilet scrubbers as a hostess gift?”
That’s when it hits me. “Oh, God.”
Liv says, “Exactly.” Then she launches into one of her arguments, honed by many an afternoon of middle-school debate club. “Think about it, Jose. The karma. If his parents moved back, he has to show up sometime, right? For Thanks-giving or whatever? So unless you’re planning to, like, never go to North Haven again, which would mean, basically, never buying anything decent, you are going to run into your dad. Which, come on, isn’t that what you’ve always—”
“He’s not my dad.”
Liv nods. “OK.”
“He will never be my dad.”
“Right.”
“He’s just the guy who inadvertently gave me half my genetic material. He’s . . . that’s all he is.”
“Yes,” Liv says, bobbing her head. She used hot rollers tonight, and her curls are bobbing too.
I know she’s humoring me. I know because the Paul Tucci argument is as old as our friendship. I know because the worst fight we’ve ever had was the time Liv e-mailed her hero, Dr. Steve, the world’s most annoying TV therapist, suggesting a father-daughter reunion show. I saw the e-mail on her computer, and I went ballistic. She didn’t do it to hurt me, she said at the time; she did it to help me. She threw out a lot of little gems like, Listen, Josie, it’s important to know the full story of where you came from. You may not like the choices your father made, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worth knowing. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forge some kind of relationship.
Relationship? How about an acknowledgment of my presence on Earth? Let’s start with that.
“OK, Josie,” Liv says now. Her eyes are soft on mine. “Whatever you want to call him. I just think you should be, you know, mentally prepared to run into him.”
She’s probably right, but I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it.
Thankfully, this is the moment when Jamie Mann bursts through the bathroom door in her orange tie-dye tankini, both hands clapped over her mouth.
“Incoming,” Liv murmurs, just as Jamie projectile vomits all over the floor, miraculously changing the subject.
