“I think you would.” There was no way that someone as gregarious and positive as Molly would bear that kind of grudge. “But there are other factors here, too. You know that Neil’s daughter died.”
Molly nodded.
“Well, I don’t know your mom very well. But I don’t want anyone to go through what I saw Neil go through. And if I’d needed help when I was your age, I would have hoped someone would be kind enough to have given it to me.”
She leaped at me, her gangly arms wrapping around me in a huge, tight hug. I had no doubt that she meant what she’d said; this wasn’t about a shopping spree or having a rich relative. She was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for, and she’d considered this meeting and this transplant from my angle, the way I’d considered it from hers.
We wore the necklaces out of the store.
After a stop at the Cheesecake Factory for the promised dessert, we headed back to the hotel. Molly talked a blue streak all the way, filling me in on her school and her friends and her hobbies. She loved Sondheim, though he “writes like he hates sight readers”, and loathed Andrew Lloyd Webber, who “writes like he hates singers”. She idolized Kristin Chenoweth and wanted desperately to be in a production of Spring Awakening before she was “too old”. Her dreams were no different than scores of other teens’, but as far as I was concerned, they were unique and precious.
Any reservations I’d had about meeting Molly had been totally removed by just a few hours of shopping. There was no doubt in my mind, now, that I would want to maintain a relationship with her. I wouldn’t drop out of her life the way Joey Tangen had dropped out of mine, and the thought that anyone felt I might be capable of that, especially when it came to a girl as bright and friendly and loving as Molly, made me ill.
But as we pulled up to the hotel and the bellman started unloading our bags, dread began to creep over me. I really had gone a little far with the purchases. And to anyone outside of my head, I would look like I was overcompensating. Maybe I was.
“What’s all this?” Sasha asked with a laugh of disbelief as she crossed the lobby. All of Molly’s treasures were piled high on a luggage cart, and I suddenly wanted to dive behind it and hide.
Instead, I held my head high and gave her a big smile. “Making up for missed Christmases and birthdays.”
“Sophie bought me a computer!” Molly practically shouted in her excitement. She pushed her hair back, exposing her half of the necklace set we’d bought. “And look! So, we can remember each other when we’re far away.”
I pointed to the pendant at my throat. “It was Molly’s idea. She is very thoughtful.”
“She’s sentimental,” Sasha corrected me, and pointed to the trolley of shopping bags. “This is thoughtful. But it’s too much. I can’t let you—”
I held up my hand. “Please. I had a great time today. And for once, I got to go shopping and not hear Neil complain about where we’ll put everything.”
Sasha laughed, a little uncomfortably. “I don’t know where we’ll put it all. We might be sitting on some of this on the ride home.”
“We can ship some,” I volunteered. I did not want them to return a single thing Molly had wanted. “And I swear, I won’t make a regular thing out of this.”
Sasha’s kind expression flickered, reminding me of Susan and the way she’d looked when she’d told me she wouldn’t have looked me up if not for Molly needing the kidney. So, Sasha hadn’t considered me to be a permanent part of Molly’s life, either?
I wanted to shout that Molly was my sister, and I had every right to be in her life, but I couldn’t. Sasha hadn’t said anything to contrary. I’d projected that onto her out of my own doubts and Susan’s words. Instead, I said, “Listen, can we meet up later tonight? Just the two of us? I have some things I want to talk to you about.”
She nodded with a resigned, closed-mouth smile. She knew exactly what I wanted to talk to her about. “Absolutely. Let me get Molly squared away with all of this, and we can meet down in the bar.”
“Aw, why can’t I come?” Molly demanded in the most petulant teen voice I’d ever heard. Well, since I’d been a teenager.
“Because you need to get off your feet,” Sasha told her sternly. “Besides, you’ve had Sophie all to yourself today. Let me have a chance to visit with her.”
“Fine.” Molly started to leave, her arms crossed over her chest. Then, she stopped and turned back to hug me. “Promise you won’t go back to New York without saying goodbye?”
“I promise. I’ll see you tomorrow after I go to the doctor, okay?” I squeezed her tight. What if I could just scoop her up and run away with her, abduct her back to New York and—
Yikes. Was I seriously considering kidnapping? I needed to get a grip.
I watched her head off, directing the bellman where to go. Sasha stayed with me. “All right. I’ll meet you down here in a half hour,” she said grimly. “And we can talk about your father.”
Chapter Fifteen
Sasha was already waiting in the lounge when I arrived. She’d taken a small side table with two plush chairs on the balcony overlooking the pool.
“Our room is right over there,” she told me in lieu of a hello, and pointed across the pool to one of the other balconies. “It’s really a nice room. Do you have a suite, too?”
“Yeah, but ours is just one bedroom. We don’t need a lot of space.” Why had I said that? We owned houses bigger than this hotel. I cleared my throat. “So, Molly is basically amazing.”
“She is,” Sasha agreed. “Drives me a little crazy, at times, but that’s what daughters do. Maybe sons do, too. I have no idea.”
“Well, it must be worth it. She’s a great girl. And a hell of a shopper. It must be genetic,” I added.
Sasha laughed a little then took a sip from the fishbowl margarita she’d armed herself with. “So. You probably have some questions for me.”
“Yeah.” I looked up as the server approached. “Just a Diet Coke, please.” Then, even though I didn’t owe Sasha an insight into our personal lives, I said, “I don’t usually drink. Because of Neil.”
“Susan said he had some issues with drinking and drugs,” Sasha said, keeping her voice low. “I didn’t read your book, but she said you really handled it all well, judging from it.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t really have a choice. It was either handle it well or fall all to pieces.”
“Your father—” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry. Does it bother you if I call him that?”
To my surprise, it did. “You can just call him Joey.”
Her smile was small and sad. “Joey stopped drinking when I was pregnant with Susan. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he might become one, with the things he went through.”
“Because of his father?” I blurted. Then, I explained, “Molly said something about him not having a great father.”
“No, it wasn’t because of that. His father was a piece of work, but Joey was a firefighter. First responders… They see terrible things, and it’s too much for some of them. He would say, ‘Better safe than sorry.’ And you can’t do that job drunk. He was on-call almost twenty-four-seven.” Susan paused. “Did you and Molly talk about Joey a lot?”
“Not at all,” I promised. “She talked about him a little, but I didn’t want to hang all my emotional shit on her. She lost her father, she doesn’t need to hear about how he treated me.”
Sasha nodded slowly. “I appreciate that. It’s been hard for her. They had their normal father-daughter spats from time to time—he hated the idea of her coloring her hair or wearing too much makeup—but they loved each other.”
“That’s…nice.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m glad she had a good relationship with her dad.”
Sasha nodded, her expression thoughtful. “It was hard for the girls to find out about you.”
Hard for them? I wanted to scoff. It was hard for me growing up without a dad. But I had to step out of my bitterness if I was goin
g to make any forward progress for myself. “How did they find out?”
It took Sasha a moment to start talking. I didn’t know if she was thinking or trying not to cry. Maybe both. “We made the decision to tell them when Molly’s condition started getting worse. Joey was already dying. Pancreatic cancer is… Well, we pretty much knew from the time he was diagnosed that he wouldn’t be around much longer. I thought it would come as more of a shock to them if I waited until he was gone.”
A shock to them. As if it hadn’t been a shock to me to find out he was dead from a Google search.
“Did you ever think about looking me up?” I asked. “To tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me. Or about him. I didn’t know if you were even aware of who your father was.”
“He came to my graduation to give me a card. I knew who he was.” I stopped just short of calling her a liar, which my wounded heart very much wanted to do. “Did you know about that?”
She shook her head sadly. “He wouldn’t have told me anything like that. He was ashamed of himself for not being there for you.”
My jaw clenched. “Yeah, well. He should have been.”
“He was.” Her face was full of concern and sympathy, despite her defense of him. “I don’t know how much you know about our history, the boarding schools and families being torn apart…. Joey’s father was white, and he kept Joey away from anything to do with the tribe. When he finally left his parents’ house and started discovering who he was, he recognized how important children are. And he deeply regretted not being a part of your life.”
“Then, why didn’t he come back for me?” I asked, trying hard to keep my tears at bay. I didn’t want to feel bad for Joey Tangen. I didn’t want to think of him as anything other than a deadbeat dad without any other element to his character. “He could have—”
“He could have,” she agreed. “But whatever his reason, he thought it would be better to stay away.”
“Well, it wasn’t.” A tear spilled down my cheek. Fuck it. I would just cry.
Sasha reached into her purse and pulled out a packet of Kleenex. She passed one to me, her expression crumpling. “I know it wasn’t. But I think he thought he was protecting you. All he ever wanted for any of his girls was that they were happy and loved. And he knew that you were loved.”
“How would he have known?” I demanded. “For all he knew, I was being beaten and starved and neglected. For all he knew, I was laying in bed every night, praying that he would come rescue me someday.”
The sick thing was, I hadn’t been beaten and starved and neglected, and I’d still prayed he would show up. I’d had wild fantasies that he would show up and scoop me into his arms and tell me how much he loved me. That he’d been away in a war, or held prisoner by criminals, and that’s why he hadn’t come to my birthday parties. I wanted something to have been holding him back, and I’d wanted that something to be a force beyond his control.
Instead, he’d chosen what he’d thought would be best for me. And he’d been wrong.
“We actually heard about you, every now and then,” Sasha said. “Through a friend of a friend who knew your mom at the hospital. We knew you were fine.”
“But I wasn’t fine.” It was a struggle to keep my voice down. “I was abandoned. I spent my entire childhood thinking something was wrong with me. That I was broken or unlovable. To this very day, this very moment sitting here, I’ve wondered what it was about me that made my father reject me.”
“That’s not what he wanted for you,” Sasha tried to explain.
I cut her off. “No, it’s not. But it isn’t about what he wanted. He was my father. He should have cared about what I needed. Instead, the two of you decided for me.”
She didn’t have a response.
“You’re saying, ‘Oh, we knew you were okay,’ but you didn’t know because you didn’t bother to know me.” My words wounded her, I could tell from her face. But I was hurt, too.
And just like that, my anger felt righteous. I didn’t need permission to say any of this. I didn’t need permission to be angry with my father, or even with Sasha. Just speaking all that truth out loud validated me. And for the first time, I truly realized that it hadn’t been my fault. Not one bit of it.
I went on, “I spent so many years feeling like I wasn’t allowed to blame him for abandoning me. But it wasn’t me who fucked up. It was him. Don’t you dare try to take that away from me with your justifications.”
Tears rose in Sasha’s eyes, and for a moment, I worried she might storm out. But she just took a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t have anything I can say to that, except I’m sorry. If we could do it over, knowing how you feel, now…I wouldn’t have listened to him. I would have chosen much differently.”
“Then, don’t shut me out, now,” I said firmly. “Susan told me that if Molly hadn’t needed a kidney, you guys wouldn’t have ever contacted me. But now, you have contacted me. I’m a part of this, now, whether you want me or not.”
“We couldn’t shut you out, now,” Sasha said with a small laugh. “Molly loves you.”
“Well, I did buy her a lot of stuff. That would have gone really far with me when I was a teenager.” I chewed my lip. “I want you to know that I’m not trying to buy her affection. I just see a lot of me in her, and I want to make her happy.”
“There is a lot of you in her. Or so Susan says.” Sasha shook her head. “Maybe after all of this is over, we could come for a visit. Molly has never been to New York. And we can pay our own way. We’re not going to use you for your money.”
“I never thought you were going to.” I knew that, if they had, Neil would have spotted it from a mile away. “I grew up working class, too. And it might seem like I’ve forgotten the mindset, but it’s still there. Even though I can buy a whole freaking mall, apparently.”
To my surprise, Sasha leaned over and took my hand. She gave it a squeeze. “You’re good people, Sophie. I’m glad we finally got to meet.”
I had to choke back my tears. “Me, too.”
****
The waiting room at Dr. Robinson’s office was surprisingly empty, considering how long I’d waited past my appointment time.
I bounced my knee impatiently. “What the hell is taking so long? I just want either a yes or a no here.”
“You know doctors,” Neil said, also fidgeting. “It’s all hurry up and wait.”
Wasn’t that the truth? During his cancer treatments, even though he’d been spending money on private hospitals, we’d practically memorized the wallpaper in dozens of waiting rooms.
I was an expert on them, now. I gave the place a critical look over. Pastel watercolor-patterned, textured wallpaper? Check. Matching rubber baseboards? Check. Ugly tight-weave carpet? Yup. Fishtank? Those practically came installed.
“I fucking hate these places,” I muttered under my breath.
“Whatever the outcome today, please…” Neil stopped himself.
“You’re going to say, ‘Please don’t be disappointed.’ That’s impossible.” I tried not to sound snappish, though god knew I’d put up with enough snapping from him in medical facilities over the years. “I’m going to be very disappointed if I’m not a match. You can’t ask me not to be.”
“I wasn’t going to say not to be disappointed. I was going to say not to lose hope,” he said gently. “We’ll get Molly a kidney, one way or another.”
“What, like, buy her one?” I scoffed.
His expression remained deadly serious. “You still vastly underestimate the channels that are available to you through our wealth.”
My throat went dry. “Neil, that’s illegal.”
“And it should be illegal for a person to die waiting for an organ because they can’t afford to travel or move somewhere that has a shorter list.” So, he’d been doing his own research into Molly’s cause. “The wealthy are far more likely to receive organ donations than those who aren’t wealthy. Haven’t you
ever wondered why that’s the case?”
“I haven’t wondered about organ donation at all,” I admitted. “It never even crossed my mind.”
“Not even when you checked the box on your driver’s license?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. It always just seemed like a given to me. ‘Please use my spare parts.’ And we always joked about my cousin riding a donor cycle when he got his Harley. It wasn’t something I’d thought about deeply. Have you?”
“Yes. But I’ve been dying before. I wanted to know if any of my ‘spare parts’, as you describe them, would be useful to anyone. Obviously, cancer ruled that out completely.” He paused and looked down. “And you know it was discussed when Emma…”
That conversation had been a difficult one. Neil had been adamant that at least some part of Emma continue on—Michael’s family had donated his eyes and some tissue for that very reason—but Valerie had been too distraught to even contemplate the same. And Emma’s organs had been too damaged by the accident and surgery.
“Yeah. And I know it bothered you.” I reached over and squeezed his hand. “Because you’re a good guy.”
“But I don’t want you to feel like a bad guy if you can’t donate your kidney for some reason,” he said firmly. “The fact that you’ve even come all this way and done all these tests… I can’t say that I would have done the same. Considering what Sasha told you.”
Neil had taken the revelations about my father’s reasons for abandoning me almost as hard as I had, but he’d gotten furiously angry about it. It was only by reminding him that this was about me, not him, that I managed to prevent him storming over to their suite and giving Sasha a piece of his very agitated mind.
“Be nice when you see her today,” I pleaded. “Especially if this doesn’t go well.”
Before I could get his promise—not that I really needed it—the office door opened, and a nurse stepped out. “Sophie?”
The Sister (The Boss Book 6) Page 27
