For Keeps

by Natasha Friend

  You could imagine Paul Tucci throwing a punch, though. He’s got that square-jaw thing working for him, and muscles you can see through his shirt. It’s almost November, but he doesn’t bother wearing a coat. His job is scaling walls and zip-lining through the North Carolina jungle with juvenile delinquents. He could take Jonathan down in one swing. . . .

  But no.

  Peaceful and civilized, Paul Tucci is holding out a hand for Jonathan to shake.

  Which Jonathan accepts—briefly—before announcing, “I need to talk to Kate.” He turns to my mother. “I need to talk to you.”

  My mom hesitates, and for a second I think she’s going to say no. But then she nods. “Let’s go inside.” She fumbles around in her bag for her keys, then clicks the door open. “We’ll be inside,” she says to me, like I didn’t hear her the first time.

  As she and Jonathan enter the house, I notice his hand fly out to perch in the curve of her back. She’s wearing her best jeans, low-riders, that hug her butt just right. Paul Tucci’s eyes zoom in, like magnets to metal, and I think, You’re damn right she looks good. Then, Stop looking at her, asshole. You have no right to look at her.

  This spark of anger makes my mouth pop open. “Why are you here?”

  “It’s pretty funny,” Paul Tucci says. “Actually. . . . I ran into your mom at the Mobile station. . . . I told her I wanted to talk to you, and she said I could follow her to your house, so . . .”

  “Why?”

  “I never knew where you lived.”

  “No, why did you want to talk to me?”

  “Oh . . .” He hesitates, clears his throat. He gestures to the pair of wicker chairs beside the porch swing. “OK if we sit?”

  I shrug. “Whatever.”

  Sitting in one chair while Paul Tucci sits in the other, it hits me that this is really happening.

  My father is here, on my front porch.

  This could be the biggest moment of my life.

  And I don’t have a clue what to do with it.

  I want to ask a million questions, but I don’t know where to start. I guess he’s feeling the same way, because he keeps clearing his throat, and there’s a nervous tic thing happening with his foot.

  “How’s your dad?” I blurt, filling the silence.

  “Good.” He nods, relieved. “Much better, thanks. The doctors say he can go home tomorrow, with some new kind of insulin pump. And, you know, swearing on the Holy Bible he’ll never eat chocolate again. . . .”

  “Right,” I say, forcing a chuckle.

  More silence.

  Then, I have to ask. “So . . . did you tell him?”

  Paul clears his throat, nods. “Yeah. . . . Last night, after you and your mom left. . . . You know what he said?” He imitates Big Nick’s big booming voice. “ ‘I knew there was a reason I liked that Josie girl.’ ”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He did. I swear to God.”

  I snort at the sheer absurdity of what I’m hearing. “Right. He just rolled with the news that his son has been lying his ass off for sixteen years and now, suddenly, the kid who’s been serving him cocoa is his granddaughter! No big deal! . . . Give me a fucking break.”

  Paul looks startled. Then embarrassed. Good.

  “It is a big deal,” he says quietly. “It’s a very big deal. Believe me, I know that, and . . . I should have told my parents sooner.”

  “You should have told your parents sooner?”My voice is hard, furious. “That’s all you can say for yourself ?”

  “No. No, it’s not . . .” He’s shaking his head. Shake, shake, shake. But no words come out of his mouth.

  More throat clearing and foot jiggling.

  Both of us stare out at the darkening yard.

  Minutes tick by. Or are they hours?

  Finally, he speaks. “You have no idea how many times I thought about coming back here.”

  “Is that right.” My tone is cool. Neutral.

  “I even bought a plane ticket once. I was in college by then, so you were probably, I don’t know . . . a year old?”

  I look at him. “What?”

  “Well, I was a freshman, it was spring semester . . . you were born in June . . . so you would have been . . . not quite one. . . . I bought a plane ticket, to come and see you and your mom, but I never—”

  “Wait,” I say. My heart has stopped. Literally. It is no longer beating. “You knew about me then?”

  He looks at me, surprised.

  “You knew my mom didn’t go through with the abortion?”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “How?” I say. “How did you know?”

  He hesitates, frowning slightly. “She sent me a letter. The only letter I ever got.”

  I don’t know what to say. I am speechless. So I say nothing. I let him keep talking.

  “Katie’s parents, your grandparents, they made it clear to me . . . even when we were dating . . . your grandmother, especially . . . they didn’t like me. . . .”

  I stare at him. “So?”

  “So, the minute I got Katie’s letter telling me she’d decided to keep the baby, I called her house, and your grandmother was the one who answered. ‘Katie doesn’t want to talk to you, Paul,’ she told me. ‘She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want you in this baby’s life now, or ever. We don’t need your help.’ I kept calling, though, even after she said, ‘If you continue to call here I will contact the police.’ I didn’t stop calling, though. Not until the phone was disconnected. And I didn’t stop writing, either, until the letters started coming back to me, address unknown.”

  Letters? What letters?

  “I didn’t know where they moved,” Paul Tucci says. He gestures to the front door. “Here, I guess.”

  “What letters?” I say out loud.

  He looks surprised, but then he shrugs. “Your mom probably threw them out a long time ago. She just didn’t tell you.”

  I sit up straight. “No.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “We tell each other everything,” I say. “We share everything . We don’t keep secrets.” As I am saying this I am realizing that it’s not really true. It is, in fact, a bald-faced lie. My mother has been keeping secrets—lots of them. But I keep going. “I know all about your Arizona girlfriend, by the way, so don’t even pretend you’re the innocent victim here. . . .”

  “My what?”

  I scoff. “Please. Did you think she wouldn’t find out?”

  Paul gives me a puzzled look. “Find out what?”

  “That you ditched her, the minute you moved! The minute you got to Arizona you started dating some other girl! . . . Your best friend Sully told her everything. At least he had the decency—”

  “My best friend Sully.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh-huh. Did your mom ever tell you what happened with her and my best friend Sully?”

  “No,” I say. “What?” My stomach drops the tiniest bit. “Did they hook up or something?”

  “Not exactly. . . . But he tried.”

  I listen to Paul tell me the story of some high-school party, a few months before he moved. How he walked into a room to find Sully putting the moves on my mom. Her pushing him away.

  “No way,” I say. “Did they see you?”

  “Sully did,” Paul says. “Your mom was . . . well, she’d had a few drinks. . . . He was definitely taking advantage of the situation.”

  “Asshole,” I mutter.

  Paul gives me a wry smile. “Let’s just say that when it comes to Katie Gardner, Tom Sullivan has never been the most objective source of information.”

  Oh my God. That explains Officer Eyebrows and his No-way-are-you-still-single comment. He wasn’t mocking my mom; he was flirting with her.

  “He liked her!”

  Paul snorts. “He more than liked her. He threw his best friend under a bus for her.”

  I picture a PVTA, a Paul Tucci pancake covered in tire tracks.

  “Th
ere wasn’t an Arizona girlfriend,” Paul says. “Just a girl that I was hanging out with. Platonically.”

  “So Sully lied.”

  “Sully exaggerated.”

  “And my mom believed him.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why?”

  Paul shakes his head. “I don’t know. All I got was the one letter. I never heard from her after that.”

  “But she loved you!”

  “I know,” he says. Then, quietly, “I loved her too. I was . . . really happy when I heard she was keeping the baby. I wrote back right away, telling her so. I kept writing too. Even though she never wrote back.”

  “You’re lying,” I say, although I’m not sure he is. “There were no letters.”

  I stand up.

  “Josie, wait.” He stands too. “I tried. I really did. . . . I called. I wrote. Fifty letters I must have written. But your mom, either she believed Sully, or . . . I don’t know . . . All I know is I never heard from her again.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I hate when you think your life is one way—when you spend sixteen years accepting certain facts—and it turns out that everything you believed was a myth. I particularly hate when that myth is standing right here next to you on your front porch, telling you something you weren’t prepared to hear.

  “Why should I believe you?” I say. I’m directing my question to the floor, where the paint is peeling away in gray dandrufflike flakes. Every summer my mom says she’s going to scrape it all off and start over, but she never does. “I don’t even know you.”

  “I know,” Paul says. Then, “Josie.”

  His hand is on my elbow.

  Paul Tucci’s hand is on my elbow.

  My dad’s hand—

  “I want you to leave.” The words come out strangled, like there’s glue in my throat. “Please.”

  “OK.” He drops his hand, nods. “If you change your mind . . . if you want to reach me . . .” I hold my breath as he slides his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a business card. “Here,” he says.

  I take it.

  “Anytime, Josie. I mean that. I’ll be in town for the next week or so.”

  I nod, silent. I can’t find the words.

  He hesitates, then turns and walks down the stairs. Across the grass, onto the driveway, and into the red SUV.

  I realize, watching him drive off, that he didn’t choose to leave. I’m the one who made him go.

  Seventeen

  IT TAKES A long time for my mom and Jonathan to finish their conversation, but it finally happens. As soon as I hear the front door click shut I walk into the den, where she is sitting on the couch.

  “I need the truth,” I say.

  She looks up, surprised. “Josie.” Then, “Where’s Paul?”

  “He left. I told him to.”

  She nods slowly.

  “Why did you believe Sully?” I ask.

  “What?”

  She looks confused, and I realize her mind is on this morning—Officer Sully, not High-School Sully. So I spell it out for her. “After Paul moved away. The Arizona-girlfriend story. Why did you believe Sully?”

  My mom frowns. “Why wouldn’t I believe Sully? He was Paul’s best friend. . . . He’d been in touch with Paul and I hadn’t. . . . Why are you asking me this?”

  “Paul said there was no girlfriend. Just some girl he was hanging out with, platonically.”

  My mom shakes her head. “It was more than platonic.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know.”

  “Did Sully give you any proof?”

  “I didn’t need proof, Josie. Why would he make something like that up?”

  “He was hot for you, Paul said.”

  “Please.” My mom snorts. “As soon as the word got out I was pregnant, I was no longer hot to anyone. Least of all Sully. It was like I had the plague. No one at school would go near me.”

  “So what—Sully never talked to you again?”

  “Pretty much. Sure, he gave me some bullshit line about how Paul and I should try to work it out for the sake of the baby, but—”

  “Why is that a bullshit line?”

  “What?”

  “Why was Sully telling you to work it out for my sake a bullshit line?”

  My mother stares at me. “Because. It doesn’t change the fact that after I wrote to Paul, telling him I was keeping you, I never heard from him again. Ever. As you well know.”

  She sounds remarkably sure about this, but I can’t be. There’s too much that doesn’t add up.

  “I know about the letters,” I say.

  “What letters?”

  I look straight at her. “The letters Paul sent you from Arizona. . . . I also know how many times he called, and how you refused to talk to him.”

  She’s shaking her head. “He never called.”

  “Mom. He told me.”

  “Well, he’s making it up.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He said you didn’t want to see him again after he moved. You didn’t want me to see him.”

  She stares at me. “He told you that?”

  I nod.

  “I don’t know why he would tell you that, Josie,” she says calmly, but I can see that underneath she’s starting to unravel. “He’s the one who ended things. He broke up with me.”

  “Because he thought you were having an abortion.”

  She hesitates. “Yes.”

  “Which you conveniently failed to mention to me until today.”

  “I know . . . and I’m sorry about that. . . . Josie, I am so very, very—”

  “So you’re saying Paul never wrote to you after he moved.”

  She shakes her head. “Not once.”

  “And he never called.”

  “No.”

  “Well.” I flop down on the couch next to her. “Someone is lying. That much is clear.”

  “I agree.”

  “And you’re saying it’s not you.”

  “It’s not.”

  “And Paul says it’s not him.”

  She presses her lips together, silent.

  “So I guess the only thing left to do is bust out the Ouija board and have a séance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Grandma and Grandpa Gardner. We’ll just have to ask them to weigh in from the great beyond.” I know I sound ridiculous. But I have to say it.

  “What are you talking about?” my mom says.

  “Paul said your parents didn’t like him. Is he lying about that, too?”

  She sighs. “They didn’t not like him. They were . . . protective, that’s all. I was their only child.”

  “So?”

  “So, after I told them I was pregnant, they were even more protective. They were . . . well OK, they were mad at Paul, for a while. They saw how hurt I was after he moved—after Sully told me what he knew. I was a mess, really. I couldn’t sleep . . . refused to eat. And they . . . my mom especially . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

  I don’t let up. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just . . . she was always saying how I didn’t need Paul to raise this baby. I didn’t need the Tuccis or their money. She and my dad would take care of everything.”

  “So, they didn’t want Paul to talk to you. Or write to you.”

  “No, they . . .” My mother’s face has suddenly gone from pink to white. Her nose is pinched at the corners.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head. She shakes and shakes like she’s trying to physically extricate a thought.

  “What?” I say again.

  She lets out a shuddering sigh. “It’s too crazy.”

  “Mom. This whole thing is crazy.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “What?”

&
nbsp; She shakes her head again.

  “Mom.”

  “OK, it’s . . . I need you to come with me, OK?”

  “Where?”

  “Just humor me, Josie. Can you do that?”

  I stare at her. I don’t have any clue what she’s talking about. But is there any real reason to refuse?

  “Fine,” I say.

  “And grab a sweater,” she tells me.

  “A sweater,” I repeat.

  “Two sweaters, OK? One for me.”

  I nod, start to leave the room, then turn back for a moment. I’m not finished with my questions. Not even close.

  But I will wait.

  I will go to the hall closet, where we keep our winter clothes, to see what we have for sweaters. And I will put in a call to Liv, telling her to come over, in case my mom is having a nervous breakdown. I just may need the reinforcement.

  Fifteen minutes later, my mom and I are in the attic. She was right about the sweaters; it has to be twenty degrees colder up here than in the rest of the house. This is what happens when no one bothers to insulate beyond the pink fluff hanging off the ceiling.

  There is also junk everywhere.

  Junk, coated in dust.

  Unless my grandparents had some sort of bizarre organizational system, it looks like they just dumped stuff every which way. My mother hasn’t gone through any of it since they died. At first she thought the process would be too painful. Then she just didn’t want to deal with it. And now all these years later, here we are. The most interesting thing I have unearthed so far is one of my grandmother’s wigs, which looks just the way I remember it: like a small, dead panther.

  “I can’t believe she wore these things,” my mom says, when I put it in her hands.

  “Well,” I say, “what would you wear if you were bald?”

  “I don’t know . . . a kerchief or something.”

  “I’d wear a baseball hat.”

  “And I,” says a voice from the doorway, “would tattoo my entire head. . . . Peace signs, dragonflies—”

  “Liv!” I jump up to hug her. I am so glad she’s here.

  Liv unhooks my arms from her neck. She takes a step forward, staring around the room. “Holy shite.”

  “That’s right,” my mom says dryly. “Piles and piles of shite.”

  “Which is why we needed you,” I add.

  Liv nods. “Clearly.”