Kiss Her Goodbye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Maybe something happened to Grandpa. He didn’t look very good last night. Jen wonders, with remorse, if he died. She could have been nicer to him. He gave her fifty bucks, even if he did address the card to Jenny, which bugs her. She could have spent some time talking to him during dinner, instead of selfishly—

  “Did you ask the boys about that gift?” Mom’s voice cuts in abruptly.

  For a moment, Jen is confused. Then she remembers. The pink bootee.

  “They said they had no idea where it came from,” she tells her mother, relieved that this isn’t about her grandfather, or anything earth shattering.

  “You asked both of your brothers?

  “Yes.” Jen pulls the covers up to her chin in the early morning chill. “And they both said they didn’t put it there. Why?”

  “What about Daddy? Did you ask him?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “No.” Her mother’s expression is impossible to read. “I didn’t mention it to him at all.”

  Jen wonders why not—especially since Mom’s making this into such a big deal.

  A chill slips down her spine, just as it did last night when her brothers denied leaving the odd present on her pillow.

  At the time, she chose to conclude that they were lying . . . or that her so-called father did it, for whatever reason. But she still isn’t speaking to him unless it isn’t absolutely necessary, so she isn’t about to ask.

  Now, realizing that her mother is rattled enough to be in here at dawn asking questions, Jen can’t help feeling uneasy.

  Somewhere in the bowels of the house, the furnace rumbles to life.

  Jen burrows deeper under the white eyelet bedspread. “What’s going on, Mom?”

  “Just tell me . . . where exactly did you find that bootee? And tell me the truth, Jen.”

  The phrase this time remains unspoken, but her tone blatantly implies that Jen wasn’t telling the truth before.

  It’s infuriating enough to shut down Jen’s emotions once again.

  “I told you where I found it,” she says icily. “It was in a gift-wrapped box on my bed. On my pillow, to be ‘exact.’ ”

  “Where is it now?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I just . . . I need to see it again.”

  “For what?”

  “Just give it back to me, Jen, okay?”

  “Back to you?” she echoes incredulously. She should have known. “So you were the one who gave it to me.”

  Her voice rising unnaturally, Mom protests, “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t give it to you; I’m just trying to figure out who did.”

  Jen watches her mother hug herself, shivering, and suspects she isn’t just trying to ward off the early morning chill. Why is she so worked up about a baby bootee? You’d think it was a gun or drugs or something.

  Whatever. This is her mother’s peculiar game, and Jen’s willing to play. Especially when she realizes she’s the one who’s in control, for a change.

  “I’ll give it to you on one condition,” she hears herself saying.

  “What’s that?”

  No going back now, Jen. Just ask her. You’ve been dying to ask her.

  She takes a deep breath, then plunges in. “You have to tell me about my father. My real father.”

  “Oh, Jen . . .” Mom sighs, falters.

  “Tell me about him, Mom.”

  “You don’t want to know. Trust me.”

  “I do want to know. Trust me.”

  For a change.

  Mom is silent.

  Jen clenches her hands beneath the sheet, willing her to talk.

  Finally, her mother sits on the edge of the bed, facing the window instead of Jen. “There’s not much to tell. His name was Quint. Quint Matteson.”

  “Madison?” Jen echoes, wanting to make sure she knows how to spell it. “Or Madsen?”

  “It’s Matteson,” her mother replies with obvious reluctance. “With two t’s.”

  Matteson.

  Quint Matteson. Two t’s. She memorizes that detail.

  “I always thought it was ironic,” Mom is saying, a faraway expression in her eyes. “Your father’s first name is so similar to his last. Matt, Matteson.”

  What’s ironic, Jen thinks, is that she’s chosen to phrase it that way. Shouldn’t she say “your father’s last name is so similar to his first”? The his, of course, referring to Matt Carmody, who isn’t her father.

  “What else?” she prods, still disgusted with her mother’s deception, yet unwilling to alienate her further. Not when she needs to know more about Quint Matteson.

  “He was a musician,” Mom continues with a shrug. “And I didn’t know him for very long. I was young, and naive, and, what can I say? The whole thing was a big mistake, Jen.”

  Jen’s eyes fill with tears. She can’t help herself.

  Mom turns to look at her then, and cries out, “Oh, sweetheart, not you. You weren’t the mistake. I meant getting involved with him, thinking he was . . . But you, you were . . . I wanted you more than anything.”

  She reaches for Jen.

  Jen allows herself to be pulled, sobbing, up into her mother’s arms.

  “I’m so sorry.” Mom is weeping, too, her tears soaking Jen’s hair. “I’m so sorry, for everything. I never wanted to hurt you. I always meant to tell you the truth.”

  “You should have.”

  “The older you got, the more I knew it would hurt you.”

  “You were right.”

  The floodgate opened, Jen is crying uncontrollably now.

  “I know. Jen, please forgive me. Please, sweetheart.”

  “I’m trying.”

  The familiar scent of herbal soap and fabric softener wraps around her, as comforting as her mother’s embrace.

  “It’s okay, Jen.” Her mother heaves a shuddering sigh, stroking Jen’s hair. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  “I just don’t feel like it is.” She pulls back to look up at Mom’s face, seeking reassurance, finding only uncertainty.

  “It will be,” Mom says unconvincingly, sniffling, digging in the pockets of her robe for tissues and handing a clean one to Jen. “It just takes time, that’s all. We have to get used to this. We all do.”

  Jen nods, doubting she ever will.

  “I still want to know more about my real father,” she says, when she can speak again without her voice breaking.

  Mom’s eyes cloud over. “I know you do, Jen, and I can understand that. But just . . . not yet, okay? Promise me you’ll give it some time. You’re not ready for that. I don’t even know where he is.”

  She’s lying. Staring at her mother’s face, Jen senses it. For whatever reason, Mom is unwilling to tell her the truth.

  And in that moment, she makes up her mind.

  “Do you promise, Jen?” Mom asks. “Promise you’ll wait awhile before you want to meet him?”

  “I promise.”

  Her mother nods. Pats her on the arm. Inhales, exhales, looks around the room expectantly.

  That’s when Jen remembers. The pink bootee.

  “You can take it,” she says, sinking back against the pillows, finding that she doesn’t have to work very hard to feign physical and emotional exhaustion. “It’s in the top drawer of my desk.”

  Mom wastes no time in crossing the room, opening the drawer, and taking out the white box. She pauses again by the bed to lean over and plant a kiss on Jen’s forehead. “I love you, sweetheart.”

  “I know,” Jen murmurs, unable—unwilling—to say it back.

  “Daddy loves you, too. You know that, don’t you?”

  Jen shrugs.

  Her mother’s gaze is shadowed. “Just remember one thing, Jen. Love is thicker than blood.”

  She says nothing, just turns her head into her pillow and yawns, as though she’s about to doze off again.

  Her mother leaves the room and closes the door behind her.

  Jen waits until she hears her foo
tsteps retreating down the hall.

  Then she bolts from the bed, pulls on a robe, and hurriedly slips downstairs to the kitchen.

  Taking the weighty volume of Buffalo white pages from the bottom drawer, she hides it inside the fold of her robe, just in case.

  Back in her room, she sits in the chair and turns on the lamp.

  She blinks impatiently as her eyes grow accustomed to the light, her fingers already blindly flipping pages. She holds her breath in anticipation as she zeroes in on the M’s, then the Ma’s, then finally, the Mattesons.

  She scans down the list, telling herself that even if there’s just a Matteson, Q, she’ll call the number.

  Yeah, great. What will you say?

  Are you a musician and did you get your girlfriend pregnant almost fifteen years ago?

  That sounds ridiculous.

  Well, then, what will she say?

  It doesn’t matter, because she’s in luck.

  Matteson, Quint.

  She stares at the listing for a long time.

  He’s my father, she tells herself. My father.

  It doesn’t feel real. It won’t until she speaks to him . . . or maybe, until she actually lays eyes on him.

  There’s an address, too.

  With trembling fingers, Jen copies it carefully onto a scrap of paper.

  Back in the master bedroom, Matt lies snoring peacefully beside the rumpled spot where Kathleen tossed restlessly throughout the night. Her ears were trained on the stillness, her body tense in anticipation of the phantom baby’s cries.

  They never came. Not this time.

  Clutching the white box in one hand, Kathleen steals across the room to her dresser. She slides the drawer open quietly and feels around inside. It takes her a few heart-stopping moments to locate the bundle she hurriedly jammed back inside when she heard Matt coming to bed last night.

  There it is.

  She slips out of the room carrying the pink crocheted blanket, stealthily making her way along the dim hallway and down the stairs.

  The heat hissing from the baseboard vents does little yet to warm the house; the lights she turns on along the way fail to dispel the gloom of a stormy November dawn. In the kitchen, Kathleen flips the overhead light switch, then sets the pink bundle and cardboard box on the table, resisting the urge to examine their contents right away.

  Instead, she first measures coffee into a filter. She’s running on empty, desperately needing an artificial energy boost. Fueled by caffeine, she might be able to make it through another day without collapsing. The cleaning lady is coming so she’ll have to clear out of here for at least a few hours, and Curran has an orthodontist appointment late this afternoon.

  As she runs cold water at the sink, she stares intently out the window at the backyard. Her eyes scan the clumps of shrubbery, search the blue shadowed nooks beside the boys’ wooden swing set and Matt’s shed at the back of the property.

  Was somebody really out there in the night, looking in at her?

  Or, God help her, is she finally cracking beneath the burden of the secret she’s kept all these years?

  With a trembling hand, she sets the automatic drip pot to brew and returns to the table.

  Carefully, she lays out the blanket on the table, then takes the single bootee from it.

  Then she removes the lid from the box and lays the other bootee on the table.

  No doubt about it.

  They’re identical.

  Everything about them matches: the size, the shape, the shade of pink yarn, the intricate scroll work in the white lace edging.

  Either the bootee that turned up on Jen’s bed yesterday is the long-missing partner of the one Kathleen has kept all these years . . .

  Or somebody went to a tremendous amount of trouble to duplicate the original.

  It would make sense that only the person who made it in the first place would be capable of doing so.

  It’s precisely that knowledge that makes Kathleen’s blood run cold.

  Robby wasn’t in school again today.

  He’s definitely been suspended—Jen found that out this morning when she worked up the nerve to ask one of his friends leaning on the radiator in the hallway.

  She figures she has at least a couple hours of freedom after detention this afternoon. She overheard Mom mentioning to Dad that she’s taking Curran to the orthodontist and won’t be home until at least five o’clock. Knowing Dr. Deare’s reputation for being late, it will most likely be after six.

  The way Jen sees it, she has two choices with what she might do with those precious unsupervised hours. She can either go over to Robby’s to talk to him in person, or she can go to find her birth father.

  The latter option wins, hands down.

  After all, Robby didn’t even bother to answer all her pages, much less wish her a happy birthday. Why should she knock herself out trying to see him?

  Your father didn’t wish you a happy birthday, either, that nagging voice has been reminding her all day. Why knock yourself out trying to see him?

  Because she can’t help it. Because curiosity has gotten the best of her. Because, quite simply, she needs to do this, in spite of her mother . . . or, perhaps, just to spite her mother?

  No. She’s doing this for herself. Really, she is.

  Maybe Quint Matteson will turn out to be a great guy. Maybe he spent his whole life regretting that he gave her up. Maybe he’s been trying to find her, and couldn’t. Maybe he’ll want Jen to go live with him.

  So, on Wednesday afternoon, as her fellow detainees head for the late bus waiting out in front of the school, Jen ducks down the deserted corridor that leads to the science building. Two minutes later, she’s making her way out the back exit.

  All she has to do is cross the football field and cut through a narrow strip of woods, and she’s on the busy highway that runs parallel to the street the school is on.

  She’s never taken the public transportation system in Buffalo, but she did it once or twice in Chicago, and that’s a much bigger city. How difficult can this be?

  She looked up the local transit routes in the Media Center during study hall this afternoon. From the shopping center across the street, she can catch a bus downtown, and from there, she can connect to one that will take her to Quint Matteson’s neighborhood.

  If everything goes according to schedule, she’ll have an hour’s worth of round-trip travel, including the final connection to the bus that will drop her on Cuttington Road. That means she’ll be left with a whole hour for . . .

  Well, for whatever happens when she comes face to face with her father.

  If he’s even at home.

  Maybe she should have called first, to make sure.

  But what could she say?

  Hi there, I’m your long lost daughter and I thought I’d stop by and say hello?

  Yeah.

  Something like that would go over much better in person.

  Riding the bus into the heart of the city, Jen stares out the window at the rows of two-story frame houses broken up by the occasional school, gas station, strip mall, or church. Jen has never seen so many churches in her life, many of them Roman Catholic. There seems to be a neighborhood tavern every couple of corners, too, many with Friday Fish Fry or Ten Cent Wing Night signs in the window. There are election campaign billboards in front of countless houses, and red-and-blue Buffalo Bills flags galore.

  Who would have guessed back when they moved here in April that Jen was returning to her hometown? How odd that her roots are here.

  She always knew Mom grew up here, but Jen was led to believe that she had moved to the Midwest before Jen was conceived. The Carmody family is all back in Indiana, and most of Mom’s family is in Chicago. Jen assumed that Grandpa Gallagher was the family’s only tie to Buffalo. Now it turns out she’s a native.

  She doesn’t feel like a native. As she boards the connecting bus on Main Street, surrounded by senior citizens and college students and strangers, some
of them men who give her disconcerting stares, she feels like a little girl lost in a foreign city.

  I want to go home.

  No. It’s too late to back out now. She’d have to wait here for the next bus back to the suburbs anyway. She’s come this far; she might as well go through with her plan. If she doesn’t, she’ll just go home and wonder what might have happened.

  As the bus heads toward Quint Matteson’s neighborhood, Jen goes over various scenarios in her head. They all start out pretty much the same—with Jen ringing the doorbell and the door being opened by a man who looks exactly like her.

  That’s where the fantasies branch off in different directions.

  In some versions, her father gathers her into his arms, holds her close, and tells her he never wanted to let her go. From there, he either asks her to live with him on the spot, or insists on driving her home and confronting Mom and Dad angrily.

  Those are the happy endings—at least, as far as Jen is concerned. In all the other variations, her birth father either denies that he’s ever heard of her, or he tells her to get lost and slams the door in her face.

  What will she do if that happens?

  What can she do? You can’t make somebody want you, and you can’t make somebody love you.

  Her mother’s words come back to haunt her. Rather, to taunt her.

  Love is thicker than blood.

  Whatever. Blood is thicker than water, and Quint Matteson’s is flowing through her veins. For all Jen knows, her mother lied about his not wanting her. For all she knows, her mother never even told him she exists.

  If he really didn’t want her back then—if he still doesn’t want her now—she needs to hear it from his own lips.

  She’ll never take her mother’s word for anything again.

  “Katie Gallagher! It’s so nice to see you again!”

  Kathleen forces a polite smile at Dr. Deare’s receptionist, the one with whom she attended Saint Brigid’s years ago. She should remember her name; maybe she would, if she weren’t so damned exhausted.

  As Curran shuffles off toward the seating area, Kathleen says, “It’s so nice to see you again, too . . .”

  “Deb. Deb Mahalski,” the woman supplies after an uncomfortable pause, the name provided not quite as warmly as it was the first time around. “I used to be Deb Duffy, remember?”