When she got home, Billy took her dinner out on the back porch and split her cheeseburger with Murphy. It was still raining, but where Billy perched in her wicker reading chair under the roof’s overhang, it was more or less dry. She thought about taking a bath and going to bed early, but she felt strangely restless. She’d poured herself another glass of wine when she’d gotten back, though it sat untouched on the side table now, and she’d taken Pride and Prejudice out of the box set. She wanted to read the scene—one of her favorites—where Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have a conversation on the dance floor. Still, the book sat opened but unread on her lap. She was looking at Murphy curled up at her feet. Was it her imagination, or was there something faintly critical in his expression as he watched her now?
What, Murph? I gave you half my cheeseburger. The rest is gone. I was so hungry I could have eaten this chair. And it’s only fair that I had the french fries, isn’t it?
Murphy, usually so forthcoming in their conversations, said nothing. Billy frowned. This wasn’t about the cheeseburger. This was about Cal.
Look, I gave the guy a ride home. Which was the only responsible thing to do, Billy explained to him now. And I did not go in for a nightcap, even though there was a part of me that wanted to. I mean can you blame me, Murph? The guy is ridiculously good-looking, not to mention charming, and rich enough to throw one-hundred-dollar bills around like confetti. Of course I was tempted. The important thing is that I didn’t give in.
At this, Murphy actually sighed, a long though still patient sigh.
I know. I get it, Murph. I shouldn’t even have been tempted. He is the definition of a poor risk. Still technically married, and planning, for all I know, to head back to Seattle tomorrow. I should put Cal Cooper right out of my head, shouldn’t I, Murph? The whole thing is a bad idea, isn’t it?
Murphy looked at her, and his liquid brown eyes confirmed this. It is a bad idea, he told Billy. A very bad idea.
Yes, still technically married isn’t very promising, is it? she asked herself. But then she remembered something Cal had said about his wife. He’d spoken—somewhat bitterly, it seemed to Billy—about how his wife had kept from him, for years, her disinterest in having children. There it was again—the lie of omission. And Billy knew, sitting there on the porch with the rain dripping down, that she was doing the same thing to Luke; she was lying to him. Albeit for a different reason than Cal’s wife had lied to Cal, and maybe Billy’s reasons for lying, as a mother, were more defensible . . . but she was lying nonetheless. After all, she had the manila envelope her father had given her a year ago last spring, only months before he’d died, as evidence of this. She remembered now the afternoon her dad had summoned her into his study.
“Dad?” she said, standing in the doorway to this little-used room. “Mom said you wanted to see me.”
“I do,” he said, looking up from some papers on his desk. “Come on in, and close the door behind you, would you?”
“Of course,” Billy said, closing it. “Why the secrecy, though?” she teased. The last time they’d had a discussion in this room behind a closed door had been . . . well, never. Even Billy’s teenage pregnancy, as she recalled, had been discussed with both of her parents in the living room.
“No secrecy,” he said, “just privacy. Your mother and I, by the way, have already discussed this.” In the next moment, though, he took a key out of his trouser pocket, unlocked his top desk drawer, and removed a manila envelope from it. Her name was printed on it in her father’s neat block lettering, and the flap was sealed and reinforced with clear tape.
“Okay, Dad. Now I am curious,” Billy said, pulling a chair over to his desk. She felt a little tremor of anxiety then. The year before, her father had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and while it was in remission now, it was never far from any of their thoughts. “This . . . this isn’t about your health, is it?” she asked.
“No, it’s not. Let’s sit on the couch, though,” he said, gesturing at the nearby leather chesterfield. Billy sat down on it, but she was still apprehensive. “Are you feeling all right, Dad?” she asked as he joined her. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” he said. She would later learn that he was not fine. He’d found out a few days earlier that his cancer had returned. But he would wait until the following week to tell the rest of his family since, as he explained to them, Billy and Luke were down from Butternut for the Easter holiday and he hadn’t wanted to spoil it for them. This was typical of her father’s stoicism and unselfishness. The worst thing about his illness, he’d once remarked to Billy, was that it was so damned inconvenient for everyone else.
“If I look pale,” he said to Billy, balancing the envelope on his knees, “it’s probably because of this sweater your mother insisted on knitting for me.”
Billy smiled. The sweater in question was bright yellow, or “baby chick yellow,” as her father had pointed out light-heartedly at the breakfast table that morning. “Dad, why don’t you just tell her you don’t like it?” Billy said. “She’ll get over it.”
“I can’t tell her because, if I’m going to be honest, I’d have to tell her that I’ve never liked any of the sweaters she’s knit for me. I don’t like wearing sweaters. Period.”
“Dad, you’ve been wearing her sweaters for thirty-five years.”
“Oh, longer,” he said. “We’ve been married for thirty-five. She’s been knitting them for me since we started dating.”
“And you’ve never asked her to stop knitting them?”
“I have not.”
Billy, who’d been amused, turned serious. “I’m not sure I understand marriage,” she said, shaking her head.
“Well, every marriage is different. But I like to think ours has been a pretty good one.”
“Are you kidding? Dad, it’s been a great one. From my perspective, anyway.”
He smiled, and she thought again how tired he looked. He studied the envelope, started to say something, and then stopped and started again. “I’ve been thinking about how to broach this subject with you,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s any graceful way to do it, though. It’s about Wesley. Wesley Fitzgerald.”
Billy’s eyes widened. It had been years since they’d discussed Luke’s father, even in passing. “What . . . about him?”
“I found him,” he said simply. “I mean, I didn’t find him, not personally. The private investigator I hired found him.”
Billy said the first thing that came to her mind. “Where was he?”
“Canada. Vancouver Island, actually.”
Canada. Is that why her own feeble efforts to find him had been unsuccessful? Because she was looking for him in the wrong country? Of course, she had found a lot of other Wesley Fitzgeralds out there, just not her Wesley Fitzgerald.
Her father, as if reading her mind, said, “I know. I tried to find him, too. Not in any methodical way, only the occasional late-night Google search. It didn’t seem possible to me that in this day and age, someone could fly so completely under the radar.”
Billy nodded. She’d felt the same way.
“I think I understand now why he was so hard to find,” her father continued. “He hasn’t left that much of a mark on the world. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way, either,” he added quickly. “What I mean is, he has no criminal record. Not in this country or Canada. He has no record in civil court, either. Never sued anyone or been sued by anyone. He never graduated from college. Never served in the military. He’s not on any social networking sites. Even his business—he owns a fishing boat that’s available for charters—doesn’t have a Web site. Apparently he relies on word of mouth for clients.”
Billy nodded, distracted. She had another question for her father, but she was unsure about whether she really wanted to know the answer.
Again her father seemed to understand. “He’s married. With two children,” he said. “Both daughters. One is nine and one is five. It’s all in here,” he added, holding the envelope out to her. But when she didn’t take it, he withdrew it.
“Look,” he said quietly. “Take your time with this. It’s a lot to absorb. I know that. And while I do want you to take this with you today,” he said, indicating the envelope, “I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything with it yet. You don’t even have to open it. Just put it away someplace private, and leave it there. Until . . .” He shrugged. “Until whenever.”
Billy looked at it distrustfully. “Dad, how long have you . . . ?”
“I’ve had this for about six weeks,” he said. “I contacted the detective a few weeks before that. For all of our amateur sleuthing,” he said with a half smile at Billy, “it didn’t take this man very long to put a file together on him.”
“Did the private investigator . . . go there? To Canada?”
He nodded, a little sheepishly. “I okayed the trip only for records collection. I didn’t say anything about taking . . . photographs. But he had some extra time while he was waiting for a flight to leave, so he followed him for a couple of hours and snapped a few photos. Not of his family. Just of him. They’re in here, too.”
“Does he—Wesley, I mean—does he seem like a, you know . . .”
“A nice guy?”
Billy nodded.
“There’s nothing to suggest he isn’t a nice guy. During the time the PI trailed him, he did what can only be described as some pretty . . . unremarkable things. He worked on his boat, picked up one of his kids at school, went to some kind of social function with his family at a church. I don’t know if it’s possible to get the measure of a man from the contents of a manila envelope, but . . .” He shrugged. “The PI said he seemed like an average joe. That was the phrase he used. He said he would be glad to dig a little deeper, talk to his ex-girlfriends, business partners, those kinds of things. I didn’t want a whole dossier on the man, though. Really, what I wanted was his contact information. And I wanted to rule out, you know, a worst-case scenario kind of thing, in case he was someone we wouldn’t want Luke to have any contact with, under any circumstances.”
Neither of them said anything for a little while. And then Billy asked quietly, “Why hire someone to find him now? You could have done this years ago, Dad. After you found out I was pregnant, even.” She wasn’t angry at him, just curious about the timing.
“I could have done this sooner. The truth is, I didn’t know if I wanted to. Honestly, at the time, and since then, too, I’ve often thought it might be simpler not to have him in your or Luke’s lives. Remember, after we got home from that vacation, I didn’t know anything about him, really. Except that he was young, rootless, and irresponsible.”
“Hmm. Well, he wasn’t the only one who was irresponsible,” Billy felt compelled to say.
“Maybe,” her dad allowed. “Still, he was older than you. And he was in a position of responsibility. It didn’t say much about his judgment . . . impregnating a teenage guest at the lodge where he worked.”
“Dad, we’ve talked about this,” Billy said, feeling a little bit like eighteen again. “You know, the part about it taking two people to make a baby.”
“So it does,” he said with a ghost of a smile. “Anyway, if I had mixed thoughts about finding him then, I didn’t now. I did it for you, Billy, to some extent. But mainly, I did it for Luke.”
“So . . . you want me to show this to Luke?” she asked, glancing at the envelope. “Or do you think I should contact Wesley?” Billy asked, apprehensive again.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked exhausted, and Billy realized suddenly how much all of this must have taken out of him. “No, I’m not suggesting that you do either of those things. Not now. Not when Luke is doing so well. And when, frankly, he hasn’t expressed that much interest in his father yet.”
Billy nodded. That was true enough. Lately his curiosity about his dad had been on the wane. It had been a couple of years since Billy had fielded a question about him.
“And there’s another thing we need to consider,” her dad said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen if and when you get in touch with Wesley. He might be angry or resentful. He might not want to have anything to do with you or Luke. Or he might feel very differently. You know, want to have some kind of custody of Luke. If you and Luke aren’t comfortable with that, and if it goes to court, it could be . . . it could be expensive and traumatic for both of you.
“But here’s the thing, Billy,” he said, leaning forward, and there was a new urgency in his voice. “Luke is growing up; he’ll be a teenager soon. And if he starts asking questions about his dad, or he wants to start trying to find him, I think you’ll have to make a decision. Before Luke is an adult, you can make that decision for him. By the time he turns eighteen, though, I think he’ll have a right to this information, don’t you?”
“I do,” Billy said, though her voice sounded uncertain, even to her. “It’s just . . . so complicated.” And there was a part of her, then, that wished there was no envelope, and therefore no eventual decision to make.
“It is complicated, Billy. Most things outside Jane Austen novels are,” he said gently. “So take your time with it. Don’t make any snap decisions. You’ll do the right thing. You always do.”
“Not always,” Billy said. “Trust me. I’ve made plenty of mistakes.”
“Well, Luke wasn’t one of them. Your mother, you, and Luke,” he said, counting off his fingers, “are the three best things that ever happened to me.” He brushed something out of one of his eyes, and Billy was amazed to see that it was a tear.
“Dad,” she said, giving him a hug. “You’re crying.” She didn’t know if she’d ever seen him cry before.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m probably just allergic to all of the dyes in the Easter candy I’ve been eating.”
“That’s got to be it,” Billy said, and now she was crying, too. “I mean, those bright pink marshmallow chicks have got to be toxic.” She hugged him harder. “I love you,” she said, and for a moment, she put aside the thought of what was in that envelope and concentrated on her dad instead. Did she know then, on some level, that he was sick again? Probably. Had she hugged him hard enough? Told him she loved him often enough? She hoped so. She’d had the opportunity to do both, many times, in the weeks ahead. But it was always that afternoon she remembered when she thought of the time she’d spent with him before he died. Here he was, an engineer who helped to build things, big things, and yet he was the gentlest of souls. He already knew how little time he had left in the world, and he’d spent it thinking about the ones he’d loved, whether that meant hiring a private investigator to track down his grandson’s father or wearing a yellow sweater he would have been very glad never to lay eyes on again.
Billy watched now, on the porch, as an errant raindrop plopped onto the little glass-topped table beside her. Truth be told, she’d never opened that envelope. God knew she’d been curious about its contents—how could she not be? But in the end, she’d taken her dad’s advice and put it away unopened. Even now it was sitting in a safe deposit box at her bank, along with some savings bonds her father had bought for Luke when he was born and several pieces of jewelry that Billy’s grandmother had left to her in her will. The key to the safe deposit box was in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet. She’d thought at the time that this had been the right thing to do; she and Luke had both been doing well, and she hadn’t wanted to upset the balance of their lives.
But that was over a year ago. And though she’d been unwilling, in that last year, to admit to herself that what she was actually doing was lying to Luke, she had to be honest with herself now. It was possible to have a secret that didn’t entail being untruthful to anyone. Yet most secrets required a degree of dishonesty. This one most certainly did. She would have to admit it to herself, at least, even if she wasn’t sure she was ready to admit it to Luke.
Still, hadn’t she lied to protect Luke? After all, there was no telling what, exactly, Wesley might do if he was informed that he had a son. He might try to gain custody of Luke, thereby creating a disruptive and disturbing court battle that could be damaging to her son. And imagining this, a nightmare odyssey through the family court system, Billy was shaken. It was possible, wasn’t it? And wasn’t it also possible that, with the assistance of a good lawyer, he could win at least partial custody of Luke? That was unthinkable, though she thought about it anyway as she popped one of the last, and now soggy, french fries into her mouth. On the one hand, she reasoned, determined to be rational, it didn’t seem likely that a judge would grant Wesley custody. After all, she and Wesley had never been married. And she didn’t think that unmarried fathers, particularly if they were not named on the child’s birth certificate, were automatically entitled to custody rights. Plus, Wesley already had a wife and two daughters. Under those circumstances would he really want to wrestle custody of Luke away from her? Besides, Wesley had disappeared before she could tell him she was pregnant, and she had been irreproachable in her parenting and care of Luke. Hadn’t she? She’d worked hard at her job, but she’d been Luke’s mother first and foremost. And he’d been a happy, thriving kid . . . until recently, she realized. Until recently.
And this reminded her of something: a woman, a coworker from St. Paul’s Main Library, whom Billy had been friendly with. She’d been a single mom, older than Billy by fifteen years, and her teenage son was getting into trouble with the law. The boy’s father, who lived an hour away, had sued, successfully, for full custody, arguing that she was unable to supervise their son. It was more complicated than that, and Billy hadn’t been privy to all the details, but her coworker had been devastated. Billy shook her head. There were countless unknowns involved in contacting Wesley.
There was, of course, a flip side to this whole line of thought. It was possible that the opposite would be true, that Wesley wouldn’t want to have anything to do with his son. And if Luke were aware of this . . . well, he’d be crushed. What child wouldn’t be if they understood one of their parents had no interest in getting to know them? And she thought about how Luke was changing now, faster than she’d anticipated. He was not only acting troubled but also getting into trouble. If he was floundering as a thirteen-year-old, how might his father’s rejection play out over his high school years? Might what was now a single skirmish with Officer Sawyer turn into a criminal record?
And what if . . . what if Billy contacted Wesley on her own, without first telling Luke, and Wesley refused to meet Luke? Would she then have to keep this knowledge of Wesley’s whereabouts from Luke even when he was eighteen? Would it be incumbent upon her to keep it from him so that he wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of being rejected by his own father? And if she kept this rejection from Luke and he located his father through his own sleuthing later in life, and he found out that long ago she’d contacted Wesley, Luke would feel betrayed. It was a mess. All of it.
Billy put her head in her hands. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—make any decisions tonight. “Come on, Murphy,” she said wearily, reaching down to pat him. “Let’s go to bed.” She stood up and collected Pride and Prejudice and the remnants of her dinner. The rain had stopped now, except for an occasional drip, and the smell of wet earth permeated the night. As she shouldered open the screen door, she reached her first resolution of the night. She would let Luke be her guide. And in the days and weeks and months ahead, she would listen to him very carefully.