Envy

by Victoria Christopher Murray

  “I guess it’s because Justus is out of town,” I said, referring to my agency’s biggest client.

  “Yeah. Probably.” The way Pamela sighed, I could tell she was glad her only dealings with our star client would be over the phone for the next week.

  Justus was a great guy, a friend—and a little more—from back in the day. His star had risen, and then he’d remembered mine. He’d helped me and my best friend, Regan, start and put our PR firm, Media Connections Consulting Group, on the map, and then he became our PR when he told everyone how I’d been central to his success.

  While he was a blessing, there was the other side, too. His demands grew in direct proportion to his success. While he may have been about 50 percent of my company’s revenues, he was 99 percent of our time and effort.

  “Okay, great. So I don’t have to cancel any meetings,” I said, grateful that Pamela knew my calendar because with all that was on my plate, I never knew where I was supposed to be. “This works. I’ll be in the office around ten.”

  “Gotcha. We’re good. I’ll let Regan know.”

  “Okay,” I said, knowing that my best friend and my assistant would hold it all down for me while I took care of . . . what? I started worrying all over again—what was going on with my father?

  I was so glad I’d spoken to Pamela all the way on my short but rush-hour-traffic-filled drive from Santa Monica to Venice where my dad still lived in the house where I was raised. For a moment, I let my thoughts drift back on those memories of growing up just six blocks from the beach, on a street where I knew everyone who lived in every house, but never realizing then how special that was.

  Venice had one heck of a bad reputation back in the eighties and nineties, but I was an insider with a different view. What outsiders never saw was a residential community filled with family and longtime friends.

  Just driving down Lincoln Boulevard altered my thoughts. My dad’s call was probably nothing more than him needing some advice for his trucking business. Yup, that was probably what it was. My dad had been a truck driver from the moment he graduated from high school. And for twenty-five of those years, he’d worked for one company—Moss Trucking. But then in 2008, under a special project that I was working on during my first year of business school, I convinced my dad to buy the company, which had been up for sale for two years.

  Parents were supposed to be proud of their children, but I always loved that scripture in Proverbs that said parents were the pride of their children. Because Elijah Wilson had made me so proud when, after balking at first, he’d stepped out on major faith and without a college degree or any kind of training, had purchased the company. Then my father had not only turned a profit the first year, but was managing to slowly grow the company each year.

  I only knew my father’s company’s financials because I was on his board—a board of one . . . then two, once Mauricio and I married. But there wasn’t much Mauricio and I had to do. We reviewed his sales and banking records because even though Daddy had an accountant that Mauricio had interviewed and hired, my dad didn’t trust anyone except for family.

  Maybe that’s why Daddy wants to see me. Something to do with the board.

  That was my thought as I made a right turn onto Brooks Avenue, then slowed my roll as I steered down the residential street. Two blocks down, I swung into the driveway and pulled up behind my dad’s Ford Explorer. When I glanced at the clock on my dashboard, the time brought all of my concerns back. Nine thirty-eight. By now, my dad would usually have put in almost half a day at work.

  I raised a stop sign in my head. Why was I stressing when I was right here? Slipping from my car, I locked it, then walked onto the porch, which creaked with each of my steps. I pushed open the guard gate, then knocked once before I used my key to enter.

  “Daddy,” I called out.

  “Gabrielle . . . is that you?”

  I frowned. When my dad walked into the living from the hall that led to his bedroom, his gait was slow, his steps seemed heavy. But what was most telling—he was still in his plaid pajamas, covered by his bathrobe. This was a man who rose before the sun. My first words to him were, “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “Why’re you asking me that?”

  Once again, I took in his bathrobe, then decided to answer his question in a different way. “Because you called me by my government name when I came in, so I know something is up.”

  “That’s not just your government name,” he protested the way he always did when I kidded him that way, though today, there was a lot more bitter than sweet in his tone. He hugged me, then stepped back. “That’s the name your wonderful mother gave to you.”

  As I moved over to the sofa next to my dad’s recliner, we shared a couple of moments of silence. This was something that always happened when my dad spoke of my mom, Mary. She’d been gone for seven years, and while that was supposed to be God’s number of completion, there wasn’t any kind of finality in my dad’s tone when he spoke of the woman whom he said was the love of his forever. He spoke of her like she was the blessed mother, and the void her death left behind still made my heart ache. But what pained me more was that I knew that, seven years after my mother died from heart failure, my dad still cried for her.

  “I’m sorry, sweetness,” my dad said as he dropped onto the recliner. “I didn’t mean to snap that way. It’s just that . . .”

  I scooted to the edge of the sofa. “What’s wrong?” I didn’t want to go through a whole lot of nothing before we got to the something part of this conversation. My dad already knew how I was, how Mauricio was, how Bella was. He already knew that I was busy at work, and I knew all of that about him, too.

  My dad nodded like he agreed—he wanted to get to the point as well. He said, “I needed to talk to you . . . about this.” He pulled a letter from the pocket of his bathrobe, but when I reached for it, he held it back. “I need to tell you something, and I’ll make this as quick as I can.”

  Now my mind swirled with a single thought—my father was ill. That letter was from some doctor giving the prognosis of my father’s demise. I had to fight to hold back the tears. I wasn’t ready to lose my father. I had just started breathing after living seven years without my mother.

  He said, “Years ago, when I was on the road . . . I had an affair.”

  My thoughts came to a screeching halt, backed up, and I blinked to press replay on my father’s words.

  “What?”

  He repeated what he’d said, then he tried to hand me the letter. But I didn’t take it.

  “What?” I said again.

  “Read this.” Again, he pushed the letter toward me, but it wasn’t a simple handoff because of the way both of our hands shook. I held the letter and held it and held it, just staring at the proper cursive writing that had written my father’s name and company address on the envelope. In the upper corner, there was an address—a post office box in Arkansas: White Haven.

  “Read it, Gabby. It’s easier . . . for me . . . if you read it.”

  Now I looked up at him.

  He said, “Read it and I’ll explain everything.”

  And so I did what my father told me because despite my shock, he was still the dad. I slid the single page from its hiding place, unfolded the paper, and began:

  It’s been so many years, my dearest Elijah. You were the only man whose name I cared to know. But there is something that you have to know now. I didn’t have that abortion I told you I was going to have over twenty years ago. I went ahead and had the baby because I didn’t want to kill something growing inside of me. I know you didn’t think the baby was yours. I know that was why you never came back. But this little girl, she is your little baby, she is your little girl. And now, I’m not going to be here much longer, and I can’t leave Keisha by herself. We don’t have no family and we hardly have any friends. I’m dying, and my little girl, our little girl, will be all by herself. I never told her about you because I didn’t want her to feel the rejection I
felt and I still feel every time I look at her face. But I’m hoping that you’ll do right by one of your own. Just look at her picture and do the right thing. This is my final request on earth.

  THE LETTER WAS signed formally . . . twice: Sincerely, Yours Truly, Daisy Jones. I read the letter again, mostly because I didn’t want to look up at my father. But when I began reading it for the third time, he called my name.

  Now I had no choice. I looked up, but what was I supposed to say?

  I was glad when my father spoke. “It’s all true,” he said. “You can ask me anything you want about this, but it’s true.”

  “But . . .”

  Before I could get any more words out, my father pulled something from the other pocket of his bathrobe. He handed me a photo, and the moment I looked down at it, I gasped. No one would deny that my father was this girl’s father. She had everything that belonged to him—his bushy eyebrows, the cleft in her chin . . . and then there was that mole, right above her lip, in the same spot as my father’s. It was like someone had taken all of his DNA and glued it onto her face.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, pressing my fingertips against my lips.

  My eyes returned to my father, and he nodded. “I can’t . . . I don’t even have the words for all of this. But the picture tells the truth.”

  “So you had an affair?” I knew that was what my father said when we started, but I was thinking he didn’t really mean an affair-affair. I was thinking more of some kind of social media thing, and I couldn’t be mad at that. My mom was gone and my dad spent so much time working, it would have been good for him to have some kind of social life.

  But that was just my denial, because he’d said affair—and affair meant a relationship one wasn’t supposed to have because one was already involved, right? And this picture—this was a picture of a young woman . . . twenty, maybe. This picture told the story of an affair that happened long ago. When my mother was alive.

  “I did have an affair. It’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something I ever admitted out loud until today.”

  I blew out a breath because it was so difficult to wrap my mind around this. My father, who adored my mother, who’d gotten on his knees and cried at her funeral because he couldn’t imagine his life without her. That man . . . had cheated on his wife? And then I had a thought. “Did Mom know?”

  He shook his head. “No, I told you, I never spoke of it, and Mary never suspected because it was a thing I carried on for about a year when I was doing that route cross-country delivering to Walmart. It was just . . .” He looked down and away. “It was lonely on the road. On those long-distance trips, I hated being by myself night after night.” But then, my dad’s head shot up. As if he wanted me to see his eyes for his next words. “It had nothing to do with your mother. I loved her with everything in me, and if she had been able to be with me when I traveled . . .” He sighed. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  His plea was inside his tone, and I nodded, even though that was not the most important part of this conversation. I wanted to talk about the letter—and what this Daisy Jones said . . . and the young woman . . . who looked just like my father.

  “So, the baby . . . you knew you had a baby?”

  “No.” The way he shook his head, he’d have a headache by morning for sure. “I never knew about her.”

  “But the letter . . .”

  “She told me she was pregnant, but I didn’t believe it was mine. Daisy was . . .” He paused as if he was trying to find kind words. “She was a woman who made her living by keeping men company.”

  If this weren’t my father, weren’t so personal, weren’t so serious, as a PR professional, I would have paused, just to relish in the brilliance of that spin.

  He said, “I was only with her five, maybe six times through that year. I didn’t stop by every time I was in Arkansas ’cause I just couldn’t do it. I felt guilty every single time. So when she said she was pregnant, I asked her why was she telling me.”

  I flinched.

  He held up his hands. “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful; it was just like I said, she kept company with many men. I wasn’t fool enough to believe that she was only doing . . . that with me.”

  “You told her to get an abortion?”

  Again, he shook his head. “No. Because I knew the baby wasn’t mine. How could it be? Five, six times? When she was with so many other men? And we’d used protection.” He paused. “Most of the time.”

  Just a minute ago, I appreciated my father’s words, but right now, he made me sad. His denials sounded like so many of the men who sat in my office, pleading for my help to spin them out of paternity claims.

  My father said, “After she told me about the baby, after I asked her how could it be mine, she told me she was gonna get an abortion ’cause she didn’t have a lifestyle conducive to a baby. I didn’t give her an opinion one way or the other. I just walked out of that diner and never saw her again.”

  “So . . . you weren’t ever curious enough to follow up with her?”

  He looked down at his hands again. “Please don’t judge me, sweetness. You have to see this the way I did, for what it was. Being with Daisy was nothing but a temporary solution to being lonely on the road. She was convenient . . .”

  “And she got pregnant,” I interrupted him, holding up the picture. “Clearly with your child.”

  He gave me a slow nod.

  “Wow.”

  “I know, it was a wow for me when I got this letter last week.”

  Those words made my eyebrows rise almost to the top of my forehead. “You’ve been holding on to this all that time?”

  “I just didn’t know what to do.” He shrugged. “I wanted to digest it a bit and then . . . figure it out. Though, from the moment I read that letter, I knew what I had to do, what I wanted to do.”

  I nodded, knowing what he meant and agreeing with him. “So did you call”—I glanced at the letter again—“Daisy? Keisha?”

  “Daisy didn’t give me any phone number, no address, just a post office box. I have no idea why she would write and tell me this, then not give me any information.”

  Frowning, I looked at the letter again. “It sounds like—Is she dying?”

  “What’s on that paper is all that I know. But I’m hoping you can help me. Is there a way you can trace this letter back to White Haven? I mean, I could go down there and see if she’s still . . . working in the same places.”

  “No,” I said, “I mean, yes. No, you don’t have to do it. I’ll do it. I’ll find Daisy and Keisha.”

  “And you’ll bring them here?”

  I paused for a moment. Bring them here? To Los Angeles? “Is that what you want?”

  He nodded.

  I gave him a smile. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

  His relief was palpable as he exhaled, his burden lifted. Together, we sat in silence, each with our own reflections. I wasn’t sure what my father was thinking, but I had one thought.

  After a minute or so, I voiced it. “Wow, I may have . . . a sister.”

  He nodded. “How do you feel about that?”

  I shifted through all that was in my head and my heart. “It’s . . . shocking. But . . .” I paused. Even though I felt his relief, I still felt so much of his distress. Leaning forward, I placed my hand over my father’s. “If she’s your daughter, then I can’t wait to meet my sister.”

  His eyes became glassy. “So we’re still in this life together, huh?” my father said, repeating the words that he’d uttered often right after my mom passed away.

  “All the time and all the way.” I spoke the same words I always said back to him.

  We stood and then my father held me. Now he stood tall and strong, the way I was used to seeing my fifty-seven-year-old father. He was still a good man. That was a truth that would never go away. So, I would help him find Keisha and greet her and accept her with everything in me.

  As I thought about it, I began t
o smile. Wow. In just these few moments, my life had totally changed. But I was ready. I couldn’t wait to take the ride—for my daddy.

  5

  Gabrielle

  I knew what it was like to be a zombie. Because from the moment I left my dad’s place, I was on autopilot—or maybe autozombie. That was the only way to explain why I didn’t remember getting on the 10 Freeway or exiting onto LaCienega and rolling up that boulevard all the way to my Beverly Hills office on Wilshire. I made that trip without having a single thought. Really, my mind was blank, even though I kept pressing, trying to think of something.

  I guess the Lord didn’t allow me to think because He knew I needed all of my mental capabilities to focus on performing my basic life functions: breathing, blinking, staring straight ahead so that I could maneuver my car without incident.

  But now that I was here, all I could do was stumble into the office suite, past Pamela’s empty desk—thank God she had stepped away—and then make it into my office. Every morning when I entered this space, I pushed open the door and paused for a moment to thank God for what He had given to me. The Media Connections Consulting Group may have only been in business for five years, but Regan and I were experiencing the success of an agency that had been around for so much longer. It wasn’t just our client list of more than one hundred celebrities and companies that was impressive—this space with its top-to-bottom windows that covered two walls of this corner office and framed the fantastic view of the Hollywood sign added to my pleasure of coming to work every day. I always wanted to thank God for the overall fabulousness of my life.

  But today, it was all that I could do to lumber to my desk. Flopping into my chair, I didn’t even spin around and check out the view—another one of my morning rituals. All I did was lower my head into my hands.

  It wasn’t that I was upset. I wasn’t, and that surprised me. I wasn’t upset with my dad, probably because my mom wasn’t here. Without her, I could focus on him. But this news still shook me.