Paternity: A Short Story

I tightened the tie around my neck, and neatened it in the rearview mirror. I put my jacket back on, it still had that new leather smell to cover the intoxicating scent of Gemma’s perfume. Finally, I popped a peppermint candy in my mouth.  After checking the mailbox, I walked up to the front door of my house.  My mind was running through the checklist of things I needed to verify before entering— I was never completely confident that I had remembered everything.  I looked down, and everything on my suit seemed to be in order.

“Hi, Babe,” I half-yelled, announcing myself.  I walked up to the bedroom, planning on taking off the suit, and jumping in the shower. Grace was sitting up on the foot of the bed with a glass of wine, her feet firmly planted on the floor.

“Hi,”  there was something wrong with her voice, but I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not.

“Hi, how was your day?”  If I asked is everything ok, I might be tipping my hand.

She puffed up her cheeks and blew out a deep sigh, and then shook her head.  Every hair on my body was standing at full attention, my spine felt cold and tingly.

“Marcy was arrested again.”  She wasn’t mad at me, but was exhausted, and frustrated.

“What did she do this time?”  It was hard not sounding relieved. I tried to keep some irritation in my voice, but all of my follicles seemed to relax in unison.

“Shoplifting, and she had an ounce on her.”

‘An ounce’ to most people meant pot, but to us, ‘an ounce’ was heroin.  She took a sip of her wine, staring forward.  She still hadn’t made eye contact with me since I walked in.  

“When did you get the call?”  This had become a routine, and we both knew all the questions to ask.

“Like an hour ago,” her voice was soft—weary not gentle.

“You want me to go down to the station and bail her out?” I pulled my jacket back on.

“Just go in the morning.  I don’t think we’re doing her any favors rushing over.”

I had said that the last four arrests, finally Grace was coming around.

“Yeah.  That’s good.”

I took a shower, while she reheated the previous night’s leftovers.  We ate mostly in silence.  Her cooking was always delicious, it was one of the things that I still liked about her.  That’s not to say that she wasn’t still a stunning woman, especially given her age, but twenty five years had made me see a lot of things that tarnished her.

For nearly four years we had known about Marcy’s problem, and Grace had made excuses.  I had insisted we let her sit in jail, try to scare her, and then we could put her in rehab. Instead we bailed her out that night, and put her in a rehab that she didn’t really want.  She allowed my daughter to become a gaunt, stinking shell of the little girl I had loved. Her hair was stringy and her teeth showing the beginning of decay around their edges.  I didn’t recognize her anymore, and I hated Grace for allowing it.

“Dinner was delicious,” I told her as we walked back up the stairs to the bedroom.  I got into bed in the gym shorts and t-shirt I had been wearing.

She undressed at her dresser, no show in it, unaware that I watched as she did.  I’m not sure she was aware in that moment of anything.  She left her panties on, but removed her bra, which was unusual for her—she had explained to me once that despite it not being comfortable, she liked to keep her bra on because it helped to delay sagging of her breasts.  The only time I ever saw them was when she would get in or out of the shower, she had even kept the bra on during sex for the past few years.  I assumed that the fact that it came off meant she was too stressed and needed to be comfortable.

She put on an oversized t-shirt and slipped into bed next to me.  I could hear the strain in her breathing, she was still upset.

I laid on my back, looking up at the ceiling, with at least six inches between us. After a few minutes of listening to her sighs and heavy breathing, I reached over and took her hand, and held it.  Our fingers intermingled, and neither of us said anything, but she held on tight.  Over the course of the next few minutes, her breathing calmed slowly, to where it was almost silent, and then I felt her grip loosen on my hand and she began to snore.  I held her hand not too tight, and not too loose as I fell asleep.

The next morning, the alarm awoke me like a siren, Grace’s finger tips had migrated to the palm of my hand.  I had managed to sleep, but had to wake up an hour early so I had time to go down to the police station.  Grace continued to sleep, her face mashed into the pillow, and her mouth wide open.  I got ready in silence, and didn’t bother to say goodbye to her.

I could see my breath as I exhaled a wide grey cloud, my skin immediately chilling to match the air temperature.  I thought about how long of a walk it would be for Marcy to walk back from the police station, and realized that Grace wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t want to have to deal with whatever repercussions she would inflict—probably yelling followed by complete silence.  It was just easier to double back.

I stopped and got a cup of coffee, and went to the drive-thru teller.  Bail had been set at five thousand, and normally I would have had to go in, but I knew Linda that worked the drive-thru from the previous times I had to come get bail money.  She was always friendly, and would give me a sad smile, because she knew what was going on.

Today she was wearing a blouse that clung to her breasts more than usual, and I couldn’t help but give her a more genuine smile than usual.  She was probably twenty years younger than me, and every time I saw her, I spent a good portion my day fantasizing about taking her to a hotel.  She just seemed to keep it all together, she had one of the best sets of pearly-white teeth, which were the perfect size, and flawless alignment; and the kind of eyes that I wanted to stare into while exploring her body.  It was too small of a town for that, and Grace knew people at the bank, and so Linda had to remain a fantasy.

Today though, Linda was more alluring than usual.  I knew it was partly having seen Grace’s breasts, and felt her touch, and having had no release afterwards, and now I was transferring my sexual tension onto Linda, but it didn’t ease the pit in my stomach, as my eyes traced her cleavage to the vanishing point at her buttons.

I could tell it was going to be a long day if I couldn’t go see Gemma, and relieve some of this tension.  Gemma normally did the job great, but looking at Linda, I realized just how aggressive I was feeling, and that I needed something new, someone I hadn’t had hundreds of times.

“Linda?” I said with my voice slightly more chipper, as she put the money in the secure drawer, and she looked up at me.  “Um… You look really pretty today.”  I smiled, and tried to play the edge between older man paying a simple compliment, while also testing the waters.

Her face didn’t shift expression at all, and gave a polite ‘thank you.’

“Thank you,” as I took the money out of the drawer, I gave her a final smile and drove off.

The police station had seven marked cars in the parking lot—probably half of the fleet— which seemed to be average for first thing in the morning. As I walked in, I went to the guest entrance, which was further away from the parking lot than the officer entrance. I suspected Marcy had the pleasure of the shorter walk.

At the front desk, I spoke with a younger officer, who was probably fresh out of the academy when I had first met him a few years earlier. He had the same pained but polite smile as Linda—it was that “look at you” smile that people give to cancer patients when they are out and active.  He gave me the paperwork that I had to fill out, which I did, and I gave him the bail money.  After a minute of counting out the money, and double checking the form, he signed at the bottom that the payment had been received and ripped off a carbon copy for me.

I sat on the bench, this part could take a few minutes. They would not only need to go get Marcy, but then give her back all of her belongings, with the obvious exception of her drugs and stolen items.  I scanned through my work emails while I sat and waited.

A woman sat in one of the other waiting seats.  She looked fragile, and upset.  Her eyes were sunken, and her whole vibe was that of a scared chihuahua.  I accidentally made eye contact, and smiled at her in an attempt to be polite.

Her response was an involuntary grimace. As uncomfortable as I had been with the eye contact, it was worse for her.  I couldn’t tell what was going on, if she had been released and was waiting for a ride, or what. My skin began to crawl at the shared space between us. Neither of us wanted to be sitting there.

“Daddy…” Marcy walked out already crying.  She looked even worse than usual. It was hard to tell if it was just from having stayed up all night in a jail cell.

I nodded my head directionally, saying ‘let’s get out of here.’

“Daddy, I swear I wasn’t stealing that shit they accused me of.”  She strapped the seat belt across her— always concerned about safety.

“Did they plant an ounce of someone else’s heroin on you too?”

“DADDY!”

She had better not start yelling, I thought to myself.

“Addiction is a disease…” she began a speech which she and Grace had begun a dozen times before.  “I can’t help that I’m addicted, but I’m really trying.”

“If you were over in Iraq, and had PTSD, and got addicted to pills…”  I bit my lips and closed my eyes.  “That would be different.  Hell, if you had an injury, or trauma of any kind, then it would make more sense to me.”

She had started stealing pills that Grace needed after a surgery, and had become hooked.  When the pills ran out, she apparently found a replacement.  When we had first found out and confronted her, she had told Grace that she shouldn’t have left the pills out.  She was seventeen at the time.

“Watching you and mom for the last twenty years was traumatic,” she said under her breath.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”  I pulled over quickly.

“Mom pretending to be some ‘dutiful housewife,’ and you ‘the loving husband.’”  She looked at me searching for my face to show recognition of what she was talking about.  Then she laughed.  “Do you think Mom doesn’t know that you fuck other women?”

Immediately, the air was gone from my lungs, and I felt like I was choking.  How could she know?  How could both of them know?  Her eyes lit up, and she knew she had hit a nerve, which she was going to dig into now.

“Do you know what it’s like being eleven, and hearing your mom crying on the phone to her sister?  Having to hear about how there was a lipstick stain on the crotch of your Dad’s underwear?”  Her eyes were on fire as her lips curled out venom towards me.  “I asked her one time, why she stayed, this was a couple of years ago.  She said she was Catholic, and didn’t believe in divorce.”  She let out an incredulous HA.  “Apparently her sister, and her parents had told her to make it work.”

Even as ugly as she was to me, she devolved more as her fangs snarled viciously, and spittle formed at her angry lips.  This was the desperation I had seen the last time she tried detoxing. She literally devolved into an animal, a dog snapping her jaw at the metal gate of a cage.  It angered me though, because I hadn’t put her in that cage, no matter what nonsense she told herself.

“You think your mother has been a saint?”  Part of my brain didn’t want to say what was coming out of my mouth, but another part insisted.  “She used to love sex, couldn’t get enough!  Even after you were born.  Then at some point she became paranoid that you would hear us, and didn’t want to scar you.  So then it became only when you were being babysat, or at a friend’s house. The dry spells went weeks, then months.”

“Not fucking you doesn’t make her the bad guy.” She didn’t look at me, she was purposely turned away from me. It made me even more mad, how could she be the one ashamed of me. I had spent her entire life providing, she had got everything every little girl could want, and then when she turned into this thing, and yet the handouts kept coming. I had spent tens of thousands on bail, some of which I never got back, because she’d skip the hearings.

“No, you’re right, it doesn’t make her the bad guy, but maybe it makes looking for it somewhere else not such an asshole move!” My vision became slightly blurry, and I felt the sweat beading on my forehead. I had lost my temper and accidentally confessed, and now I was starting to panic.

I drove in silence, pulled up to the house, and unlocked the passenger door.  “Thank your mother.  She’s the reason I even stopped to pick you up this morning.”

I watched her walk up the front walk, and go into the house. I had been fooled before, there was no way that I was going to drive away, and have her turn around and head off.  She needed to go see her mother, look at what she was doing to her.  When the door closed behind her, I texted Grace that she was home, and drove off.