by Hazel Parker
“You didn’t need to know everything.”
And we were back to where we started.
“I do when I’m the one overseeing money!”
“You got the money. I’m not hiding any money from you!”
“You’re hiding where the money came from!”
“It’s not illegal! We’re not hiding it from the IRS. We’re not in danger. There’s nothing more to worry about.”
I cursed under my breath and threw the papers behind me.
“You know damn well Dad would have said something about this,” I said. “You know damn well that he would have said something. But I guess when you’re a bastard, you’re afraid to tell the truth.”
“Watch your mouth, Brad,” she said. “You’re quick to judge, but you would know better than anyone what that’s like.”
That…
Wait.
What?
What the fuck did she just say?
Did she…did she just fucking mean what I thought she meant? Was she saying what I thought she meant?
The immediate regret that formed on my mother’s face said it all. She may not have meant to say what she said, but she had said the truth.
“What the hell does that mean…” I said, my voice trailing off, not wanting to hear it said out loud.
But we’d already spilled too many family secrets tonight. What was one more drop of gasoline onto the fire? Why the fuck not?
“It means, Brad,” my mother said. She paused long enough that I wondered if she was going to change her mind. But no. She drove the dagger—at this point, more like a sword—fucking through me. “Eddie is not your biological father.”
I staggered back.
No…no…my father…the man I called my father…he’d raised and doted on me as any father would. Much more than Mom ever had, in fact. He’d loved me; he’d cared for me. How the…how the fuck was this possible?
How did this even fucking make sense?
I stared at my mom, waiting for her to say that she’d only said what she had in spite and in anger. But she didn’t. She looked like she was both relieved and saddened to have released a truth she’d held for thirty-two fucking years.
“What…what the hell do you mean? Eddie is not my father? What the fuck? This can’t…are you trying to make this as stupid as possible? Are you trying to antagonize me as much as you fucking can?”
This time, though, my mother started sobbing. And it wasn’t just one tear.
In fact, it looked like a cascade of tears. She was crying uncontrollably. She couldn’t hold anything in. She kept saying sorry over and over again, but she couldn’t form any further words.
This was just what I needed. Great. Fucking great. The week had started so well, concluding the honeymoon for Megan and me, and now it was ending with the revelation that my father wasn’t my father, that my grandfather had been a very rich asshole, my mother was a bastard child, and on top of that, everyone still wanted me to get divorced from Megan.
“Then who the fuck is my father?” I said, not sure I wanted to know the answer.
But if we’d come this far, then why the fuck not throw another bombshell?
My mother, though, was still drowning in her tears and sounding like a teenager who’d just gotten dumped for the first time in her life. It was infuriating, especially since it was her own damn fault for keeping this secret for so long.
“Mom! Answer me! Who the fuck is my father?”
“Brad…”
“Just fucking tell me; I can take it. Stop fucking keeping secrets from me!”
“Giuseppe.”
Oh no. I called him something else. But I knew who she meant.
“Uncle Gio. He’s your father.”
Chapter 18: Megan
There was the briefest of moments when I woke up that I thought I had just had a really, really shitty dream.
For that blissful five or so seconds, my dad hadn’t died. Brad hadn’t ghosted me. I was still in my happy place, back on the Pegasus boat, back on Lake Mead, making love with the man I’d had a crush on for years, with family still.
And then I looked at my phone and I saw an automated message from the hospital.
Yep, it was real. No, it was not a dream. And sadly, yes, my father was still dead, Brad was still nowhere to be seen, and I was no longer in my happy place.
I sat up out of bed. And as I did, my brain seemed to recall more and more. I could still remember the gray, lifeless face that my father had had when I walked into his hospital room. At least the doctors had closed his eyes. I couldn’t imagine I would have ever forgotten that nightmare of an image if they had not done that.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, on the verge of crying again and possibly throwing up.
The only—only—solace, if I could even call it that, was that it was a Saturday, so at least I had the weekend to mourn. I didn’t have to worry about taking over the company on the spot, and I had a couple of days to rally the strength to appear before everyone and then plan a fucking funeral.
But I feared all that would do was just make me spend more time making myself overly anxious about how badly I would fail as CEO of the firm. I was supposed to apprentice under my dad for three months and learn the ways. I thought that time was also going to make me closer to my father.
Maybe we’d even reconcile.
Maybe we’d even find peace.
Maybe, just maybe, we’d put aside our stubbornness and find a way to get along with smiles, laughter, and love.
No more.
I went through the motions of getting ready for my day, but Jesus, even just getting up to brush my teeth felt like a real struggle. I hadn’t felt depression like this since my mother died, and in some ways, this was worse, because at least my mother and I had gotten along. Now, there was no getting that back.
I didn’t know what depression was like, but I was starting to unfortunately get a too good idea. It was just…inertia. Like getting out of the bed was a struggle. Feeding myself was a struggle. As weird as it sounded, even going to sleep was a struggle. It was too early in the morning for me to be up on a Saturday, but here I was, unable to fall back asleep.
“Fuck me,” I said.
Somehow, the next couple of hours went by, but that’s all they did. They just passed. I certainly didn’t do anything with them. I managed to get myself to the kitchen and ate a bagel, but I didn’t bother preparing it with cream cheese or even toasting it. I just ate it absentmindedly like a donut.
I went over to the couch, grabbed my phone, and just drifted through website after website. It took me about an hour before I finally found the courage to reach out. I texted Julia.
“Don’t call me. But I need you to come over. My father died last night. I’m so fucked up.”
I wanted Julia. But I didn’t want to hold a phone up to my ear. I just wanted someone I could lean on right now, someone I could hold and bawl my eyes into. Julia would know to do that, but on the phone, no one liked silence.
She responded right away, saying she was sorry and she’d head over immediately. I didn’t smile, but I felt the closest thing I’d felt all morning to something “good.” At a time like this, I would take it.
* * *
When Julia came over, she let herself in. She came over to the couch and embraced me. I thought that I would bawl my eyes out right then, but honestly, I didn’t have any tears left to shed. I was just an empty husk of a person at the moment, and the only thing that would nourish me back to being full was time.
“I’m so sorry, girl,” she said, squeezing me tight.
After what felt like five minutes, I finally leaned back from her and glanced at her.
“This week started out so good,” I said. “Brad and I worked it out, my father accepted the terms and said he’d begin transitioning me to becoming CEO. And now I have a company to run by myself, an annulment to sign, and I have to plan a funeral. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
I knew Julia
had no good answers. No one had any good answers. I wasn’t even sure good answers existed. At least Julia knew what to do. She leaned forward, kissed me on the top of the head, and hugged me tightly.
“Just take all the time you need,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through right now.”
“And what would I do with that time?”
It was an unfair question. It was asking someone who had no experience what to do in the direst of circumstances.
“I would say, I don’t know, just take some alone time. Some you time.”
“I don’t want alone time!” I snapped. “I’m tired of alone time. It feels like it’s all I’ve had for the last decade. I…I’m sorry. This is not your fault.”
I sighed.
“You get a big bottle of wine when this is done.”
Julia politely laughed.
“It’s what friends do,” she said. “If alone time won’t work, maybe you could find something to busy your mind with. Go for a jog. Get out of town. Do—”
It snapped in my head.
Work was the only thing that would occupy my mind.
Yes, it might have sounded like I was just brushing dad’s death aside, but he would expect nothing less than for me to come in and get started.
“You gave me an idea, Julia,” I said. “And I can’t thank you enough for it.”
After all, she was probably the only person left in the world whom I could trust not to deliberately hurt me.
* * *
With it being Saturday, I was able to get to the top floor with only the secretary between my father’s office and me, and if she knew, she was smart enough not to say a word. She just nodded to me, and the elevator took me right up. She had to have known by now. I called a few people.
And if she knew, almost everyone else in the office would know. Monday is going to be a hell of a workday, huh?
Monday was going to be the kind of day in which it would have been nice to have someone to look forward to coming home to. It would have been nice to know that Brad would be there waiting for me after that kind of day.
But, alas…
The elevator doors opened, and I walked down to my father’s office. It looked exactly like it had on Monday evening when I had presented him with the marriage documents. It was kind of surreal to think that I’d be the one sitting in this office on Monday.
I started cleaning the place and going through some of his stuff. For the first time I took note of the paintings and other decor on the wall. For example, I saw that my father had graduated from Columbia in 1980, but I had not known that he then attended an MBA program at NYU right after.
I saw paintings of what looked like Rome, Australia, and Bali. I had vague memories of my father being a kind and gentle soul back in the day, but that had been so long ago that all I could associate with him was being a cold-hearted, ruthless businessman. I had to wonder how much my mother’s death had affected him.
I went through his desk drawers and found the usual—business supplies, old documents, manuals for certain things. But then I noticed something in the main drawer.
It was a copy of one of the photos I had.
It was the last photo my mother had ever taken with us.
If one paid close enough attention, one could see the signs that she was ill. But with her sunglasses on and a normal dress, she otherwise just looked like a skinny woman enjoying a vacation with her daughter and her husband. Everyone was smiling, and I could remember that trip genuinely making me happy.
Would Brad and I ever have a photo like this?
I couldn’t say. It was as much up to him as it was up to me.
But as I put that photo down and reflected on it, I knew that I couldn’t just mope and whine about life. I could mourn what had happened, but I still had to get my shit together in some capacity. I still had to act like an adult.
And more than that, I still had to remember that I had that cheerful little girl smiling with her parents inside of me. Just because life had made some serious emotional scar tissue didn’t mean I couldn’t unlock her.
And if I wanted to avoid becoming like my father, bitter, angry, and cruel at the world until the last days of his life, I knew I needed to do what Julia said. I needed to take care of myself.
Chapter 19: Brad
It took no time at all for me, upon waking up, to feel angry all over again about what had happened last night.
I kept waiting for the fucking punchline to come. You know, the part where my mother would say “OK, this was a joke that went too far.” Or “I pushed you too much.” Of course, she wouldn’t fucking do that, but then again, “of course,” my mother wouldn’t fucking keep a family secret like that from me.
And the worst part was, “a” family secret was inaccurate. There were too fucking many to count!
My mother was a bastard child? She was relying on monthly payments from some mob guy who ran a supposedly family-focused winery to make ends meet? She’d gotten ten million out of them?
Uncle Gio was not really Uncle Gio but Daddy Gio?
This was too fucking much. I prided myself on being able to withstand a shitload of bad news, but I had my limits to what I could fucking take.
I had to get to the bottom of this. I texted my mother and told her I was going back over to see her. I didn’t bother to see if she responded. It wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference.
* * *
When I knocked, the force of my pounding opened the door. My mother sat at the back of the room, her arms folded, what looked like a mixed drink in front of her.
“Already?” I said. “One bad night and you become an alcoholic.”
“I know you’re not coming over to say good morning,” she said. “It’s my hope that having this drink keeps me calm and able to answer your questions in full.”
Well, may this be far less revealing than last night. Though I think by default, that’s all but guaranteed.
“You better tell me that what you said about Gio and you last night was a fucking joke,” I said. “And you’ll forgive me if I feel a little shocked to learn my father isn’t my father. So no, I’m not going to apologize for swearing, not with fucking bombshells like this.”
My mother sighed.
“I’m sorry, Brad, but it’s true.”
“Fucking Christ,” I muttered. And then I asked a question I did not want to but knew I had to. “Does Gio know?”
Gio was the lone older male figure left in my life that I still looked up to. I listened to other businessmen, but none understood me, and besides, they were equals, not superiors. I had no older cousins or friends. Hell, I didn’t even have any close friends my age. My best friend moved to L.A. a few years ago and we lost touch. Gio was the only man I had who I took advice from more or less without reservation.
And if it turned out he was harboring a secret like this, the darkness that would consume me…I’d feel very isolated all of a sudden. The world did not want to see me in a pissed off mood, much less my mother.
“Yes, he knows.”
I didn’t know if that was the answer I wanted or not. I’d thought I’d want him not to know, but now that I heard it, maybe there was some value in just having the truth out there.
“So then what the hell happened?” I said, although I was much calmer than I’d been moments before.
My mother took a big gulp of her drink, almost finishing half of it. I pursed my lips and decided against calling her out for drinking again. She had enough fucking shit on her plate.
“Gio and I met a week before your father and me. We were at a great party, we hit it off, and the rest is history. That was it. This one isn’t scandalous or anything. I didn’t even know your father at the time.”
I suppose that made me feel a little bit better. It was all relative, of course. I would have much preferred for this to not even be an issue in the first place. But as far as “shocking truths” went, it could have entailed a lot more drama.
“No one knew that we slept together, but then again, no one bothered to ask. A week later, Eddie asked me out. At first, I didn’t make the connection, but when I did, I realized it honestly didn’t matter that much. Gio had gone back to Las Vegas, no more than a distant figure. Eddie was a genuinely good guy, and sure enough, as you well know, he became the love of my life.”
She took another sip.
“I found out a few weeks later that I was pregnant. When I was given the expected delivery date, I knew it was Gio’s. I called him and he was in shock, but we both understood that if Eddie knew, it would cause more trouble and heartache than it was worth.”
“Even though you two…”
“Well, remember, Eddie never knew, it was a one-night stand,” she said.
I was all on board with this story, but to now know that my father—or the man who had raised me, I didn’t really know what the proper title to call him was—had no idea what had happened…it suddenly felt like keeping secrets here was a family past-time of sorts, and I didn’t like it one bit.
The last thing I needed to believe was that I was more of a Ferrari than I had ever wanted to be. They were already rich pricks from afar, and having them now realize they were distant cousins by blood was fucking sickening.
“So you’re telling me my father never knew and Uncle Gio has just played along all these years, never once hinting at it or revealing anything.”
“If Eddie did piece it together, he never alluded to it.”
God, I hated how she was calling dad by his first name so…coldly. So abruptly. She’d always referred to him as “your father” or “dad” when he was alive. And now he was just a man with a first name, like a waiter you knew well? How callous and crass was that?
“You were his son, his firstborn son, and he loved you so very much.”
My mother started to sniffle. Except I wasn’t his firstborn son. I’m…
I’m a bastard, too.
Fucking hell.
“And yet, no one ever told him,” I said. “No one ever decided to take the lumps with telling the truth.”
