“Twenty-five, thirty years ago, it wasn’t all ‘I’m here, I’m queer, I don’t care what you think.’ It’s different now.”
“Maybe not as much as you think. Tell me more about how Gran felt.”
The man’s face saddened. “She had a hard time with it. People’d ask, hey Lisa, when’s Gillian settling down? She’d always say she hadn’t found the right guy yet, or she was working on her career, that kind of thing. But she was already living with Annette at that time. Lisa, she’d tell anyone who asked that they were just roomies, saving money by sharing accommodations.”
“I liked Annette,” Chloe said. “She was a good mom.”
“That still sounds strange to me,” he said. “When you’ve got two of ’em. How long’s it been? I lose track of time these days.”
“I was ten,” Chloe said.
“Wow.”
“Anyway, did there come a point when Gran accepted it?”
“I guess. She had to move with the times.”
“How did she handle it when Mom told you she was pregnant?”
Her grandfather let out a little hoot. “Boy, that was something. Turned her world upside down. But not for long. She figured your mom finally started playing for the right team. That she was sneaking out on Annette and having a real goddamn heterosexual affair. Be the first time she’d have approved of adultery, I’ll tell you. She had no idea for some time that there was — gotta watch how I say this — no kind of hanky-panky going on. That the whole thing happened in a doctor’s office.”
“A fertility clinic,” Chloe said.
“Yeah, right, one of them. We didn’t know much about those. A child needs a father, your grandmother kept saying. A mother and a father. Two mothers, that was just unnatural. When she found out it wasn’t an affair, she was disappointed.” The old man looked down, unable to look his granddaughter in the eye. “I won’t lie to you. I kind of felt the same way, at first. It took me a while to realize that as long as you were loved, that was the only thing that mattered.”
“Did you talk to my mom around that time? About the choice she’d made? About having a child that way?”
“You could ask her that yourself.”
“She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
He grinned slyly. “So I’m telling tales out of school?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Yeah, we talked. I was asking her, who’s the father? She said she didn’t know. I said, how can you not know who it is? And she says, she knew things about the father, just not who he actually was. Like, what he looked like, what he did, what his interests were. A whaddaya-call-it.”
“A profile?”
“Yeah, a profile.”
“And what did she say about the profile?”
The old man’s eyes rolled skyward. “Honestly can’t remember much.”
“Try,” Chloe said. “Anything she might have told you.”
“She hasn’t told you anything?”
“She says it doesn’t matter. It’s like he doesn’t exist, like he never existed. Like it was some kind of immaculate conception. If I can’t know him, she figures, what’s the point? He can be anyone you want him to be, she says. Imagine he’s Bill Gates or Robert De Niro. As if either of them donated sperm.”
Her grandfather winced.
“What?”
“It’s just... that word.”
Chloe tapped his knobby knee and smiled. “So you don’t remember anything she said about the donor?”
“Just that he was... what was the word? Suitable. That’s it. A suitable donor. Oh, and smart.”
“Smart?”
He nodded. “He was supposed to be very smart. That was in the profile. I guess maybe he had to give information about where he went to school, degrees, that kind of stuff.” He paused. “What time is it?”
“Uh, almost three. You getting tired, Grandpa?”
“A little.”
“I think we’re good for today.” Chloe tapped the screen. “I was about to wrap it up anyway. My shift starts at five and I’m gonna go home and change first.”
“I want to eat there one day. Where you work.”
Chloe laughed. “Dad, as bad as you think the food is here, it’s better than where I work. If I didn’t wait tables there, I’d never set foot in the place.”
Chloe removed the phone from its stand, collapsed the tripod, packed up her gear, and gave her grandfather a kiss on the head.
“See you this weekend,” she said.
“Okeydoke.”
“We can talk about other stuff. Like when you were in Vietnam. You must have a lot of stories from then.”
“Not many I want to talk about. But sure, we can do that.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder and went out into the hall. She was passing the nursing home reception desk when she heard her phone ping with an incoming email.
Chloe stopped, dug the phone out of her bag, pressed her thumb to the Home button, tapped on the mail app.
And stopped breathing.
It was an email from the WhatsMyStory people. The ones she’d sent her DNA to weeks ago for analysis. The ones who said if there was anyone out there she might be related to, who was willing to be contacted, they’d connect her.
The phone was trembling in her hand. She took a deep breath, steadied her thumb, and tapped the screen.
Three
Merritt Parkway, north of Norwalk, CT
Miles Cookson spotted the flashing lights in his rearview mirror before he heard the siren. He glanced at the dash, checked the speedometer. Ninety miles per hour. Okay, that was definitely above the speed limit, but in a Porsche Turbo, that was a notch above idling.
He had the Sirius tuned into the Beatles station, which was playing tracks from The White Album, and when “Back in the U.S.S.R.” came over the speakers, Miles tapped the volume control on the steering wheel until the music drowned out the sound of the roaring engine behind him, which was no small accomplishment considering a 3.8-liter turbocharged boxer-six engine, rated at 540 horsepower, was pushing him forward.
Just as well Miles happened to see the flashing lights, because he’d have never heard the siren.
He had no doubt he could outrun the police, even if it was one of those supercharged cop cars. Didn’t matter how powerful an engine you put under the hood of some stock Ford or Chevy or one of those snappy new Dodge Charger models. Sure, they might have speed on the straightaway, but if Miles decided to take the next off-ramp, he’d be hitting the curve at sixty or seventy. One of those cruisers tried to take the ramp at that speed and it’d be flying through the air like a cop car in The Blues Brothers.
But Miles wasn’t about to lead anyone on a chase. He didn’t want to get anyone killed. Not an officer of the law, and not some innocent bystander pedaling along in a Prius. The smart and responsible thing to do was pull over and take his medicine.
So he took his foot off the gas, put on his blinker, and steered the car over to the shoulder, gravel kicking up noisily into the wheel wells. The police car pulled over behind him, lights flashing. The cop didn’t exit his vehicle right away. He was probably entering Miles’s plate into a computer, waiting to find out if it was a stolen car and whether the driver needed to be approached with more than the usual caution.
I’m harmless, Miles thought. I’m only a danger to myself.
He sat in the leather bucket seat, waiting patiently. Turned the ignition to off so that when the cop was approaching, he wouldn’t hear the purr of the engine and think Miles was going to make a break for it.