But nobody ever told you what to do if you got those gut feelings about the man who was supposedly your father.
“What you starin’ at? Get in the car, I said!”
Swallowing nervously, I pulled open the passenger door and slid into the front seat, the ripped vinyl making dull tearing noises on the backs of Terry’s jeans.
He had the car in drive and was squealing away from the curb before I even got the door all the way closed.
“Been looking everywhere for you. My sister must have lost her damn mind,” he muttered, looking more at my hair than at the road in front of him. His tires bumped a curb and he quickly corrected, then overcorrected, the car swerving into the other lane and back again. “Lettin’ you color your hair, paying for it with money she ain’t even got. The two of you look ridiculous. And now my girls are feelin’ left out and Tonette ain’t gonna have ’em goin’ around lookin’ like that, that’s for sure. You keep tellin’ me I’m your dad, but you don’t even ask before you go and color your hair somethin’ stupid.”
I gritted my teeth, willing my mouth not to open, willing my ears not to hear him.
“You just gonna sit there like a loaf a bread?” he pressed.
But I continued to stare straight ahead, ramrod stiff on the torn passenger seat, watching him sway and swerve and knock into things like a pinball, clenching my teeth and my fists and my heart, feeling my resolve to stay silent crumble. If I didn’t speak up for me, who would?
“If you’re gonna leave the house, you need to tell someone you’re goin’,” he ranted.
“Why?” I said, turning on him.
He pulled up to a stop sign, glanced at me. “What do you mean why?”
“I mean why do I need to tell someone?”
He looked at me, incredulous. “So people don’t go worryin’, that’s why.”
I coughed out a laugh. “Who is worried? Tonette? Billie? Harold, who never even speaks to me? You? Give me a break. Nobody here cares about me.”
“That don’t give you the right to disobey the rules.”
I hadn’t wanted to get into it with my father, but I’d opened my mouth, and now there would be no shutting it again. “Lexi and Meg told me you didn’t want me here. Why did you agree to let Ronnie send me?”
He turned hard into a parking lot and screeched into a space. For a second, I got scared that he was going to do something dangerous. “I ask myself that every day,” he said, his nostrils flared. “Maybe ’cause Tonette’s right and I’m some sorta sap. Guess I figured after all these years of your mom keepin’ you from me, I deserved somethin’ outta you.”
We were staring at each other now, each of us with hate in our eyes. “What are you talking about?” I said. “She never kept me from you. You walked out on us. You never came back.”
A slow grin spread across his face and he began nodding as if it all made sense to him now. “Is that what she told you? That I walked out?” He tipped his head back against the seat and laughed, then turned to me again. “I got tossed out. Christine ‘wanted somethin’ better.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers when he said the last three words, then jammed a stubby thumb at his chest. “I told her I could be somethin’ better, I’d get a job and stop drinkin’ and would take care of you. But she said she deserved more and I’d see you again over her dead body and that was that. And look. She’s dead and now here you are.”
“You lie,” I said through my teeth, but a part of me could tell that he wasn’t lying. A part of me could see it in the slight tremor of his thumb, could see it etched into the lines around his eyes. “You never wanted anything to do with me.”
His eyes hardened and he paused, sizing me up, the muscles of his jaw working. “Damn shame that’s the story she gave you. ’Cause it ain’t the truth.”
“It’s not a story. It is the truth,” I said, but my voice was wavering, getting softer.
He put the car into reverse and began backing out of the parking spot. “When I threatened to get the law involved, she started sayin’ you weren’t even mine.” He put the car into drive and glanced at me one more time. “I believed her at the time. She was some kinda messed up and I wouldn’t a put nothin’ past her at that point. But anyone with eyes can see we got the same DNA.” He pulled out onto the road and started heading toward the house again. “And then she was gone. Moved. Wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared on someone. I gave up. Met Tonette, started over. Forgot I even had a daughter named Jersey. Didn’t seem like there was anything else I could do.”
We drove along for a few minutes in silence, the town giving way to squat cookie-cutter homes. I wanted to get back to the house, to retreat to my couch and pull the blanket over my head, try to disappear from the lies, try to ignore the sinking suspicion that the liar was Mom, not Clay. Just thinking it made me feel like a traitor.
If what he said was true, the story of my life was a lie. I’d spent so many hours wondering about him, imagining him, wishing he’d come to my birthday party or to Christmas mornings or would stop by or call to see how I was doing. He never did, and I’d spent so much time hating him for abandoning me.
But according to him, he hadn’t. She’d kept him away.
She let me think it was about me. She let me pine for him. She told me he was a monster, worthless, dangerous. She made me afraid of him. She encouraged me to hate him. I refused to believe it. I couldn’t.
“So why, then?” I croaked. “If what you say is true, if you tried so hard to stay connected with me, why don’t you want me here now?”
“Because I don’t need no paternity test to tell me whether or not you belong to me. At this point, I already know you don’t. You were Christine’s from day one. You ain’t my kid. You’re a stranger. And you’re messin’ with my real family.”
“I never had a chance to be your real family,” I said.
He shrugged. “That ain’t my fault.”
He pulled into the driveway roughly, and I leapt out. I swung the door shut and tromped around the back of the house while he laid on the horn. I heard the front door open and Tonette’s nasal voice squawking, “I’m coming! I’m coming! Jesus, keep your wad in your pants, Clayton!”
I was so busy thinking about my mom as I flung open the door to my porch, I didn’t even notice Lexi and Meg until I was practically on top of them.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
My half sisters were sitting on my couch, laughing.
“You look like an old lady,” I heard one of them say, but my mind was unable to make sense out of what exactly I was seeing.
They had Marin’s purse. It was open on Lexi’s lap, the contents bared to the world. Marin’s things. My things.
“What…?” I started, but then I noticed that both of them were chewing gum, the foils wadded up and tossed onto the couch, and they both had pink, lipstick-smeared mouths. Lexi was clutching Mom’s lipstick in her hand, rolled all the way to the top, the pretty slanted point ruined. Across the front of the purse they had written “COW” in Mom’s lipstick.
“You got some seriously messed-up taste in lipstick, Granny,” Lexi said, but she looked nervous as she said it, as if she knew they had crossed the line this time.
I reached out and snatched the lipstick out of her hand. “That was my mother’s,” I said, feeling a rage swelling so big inside me, I wasn’t sure how to contain it. I’d unclenched my teeth, and everything I’d been feeling in that car ride home—hell, everything I’d been feeling since the tornado—strained to get out of me. I felt bare and taut, an exposed nerve, a caged animal, a spring.