There was more to the letter, but Jack let his hand drop to the bar while he stared, wide-eyed and openmouthed at Denny. He looked him straight on and said, in his Jack way, “Are you shitting me?”
Denny paled. “No, sir. You’re the guy I came to find.”
“Are we sure?” he asked.
“After the letter,” Denny said, “we talked about it. She was a young girl, but girls that age think they know everything—her words, not mine. She worked at Camp Pendleton. She got that job to meet guys, she said, but ended up working there for about ten years, a civilian employee. But she said she didn’t screw around. She liked to go out, go dancing, go to movies, parties, that kind of thing. I have some pictures,” he said, going back into that pocket. “She was so pretty.” He passed the pictures across the bar.
Jack frowned. She didn’t look twenty in the pictures, but older than that. He said nothing, just waited for Denny.
“She said when she met you, she just lost it. Totally fell for you, but you had some orders pending and said you could only date if it was understood…”
Jack shook his head sadly. “That sure sounds like Jack Sheridan….” He looked at the photos. Both of them were studio portraits taken with a much younger Denny. She was an attractive brunette with a sweet smile and a handsome little son. He wanted to bang his head on the bar. She looked vaguely familiar but he couldn’t remember her. He wanted to remember her so much he ached inside.
“She told me about your parents—your dad was some kind of stock broker or something. And your four sisters—two older, two younger and the little one still in grade school. But the part that embarrassed her and kept her from being honest with me—she started dating Bob right away after you left because she was so lonely and so heartbroken with you gone. And she realized she was pregnant and Bob couldn’t be the father by a month.” He shook his head. “She said there was no one else, Jack. And I know she was my mom, but I believe her anyway.”
“Denny, when I was twenty, I was at Pendleton for a few months. I remember dating a girl named Ginger for a while, but I was all caught up in the Corps. Ginger broke it off with me because I wouldn’t think serious.” He shrugged. “There might’ve been a couple of girls here and there, but I don’t remember any who could’ve been in love….”
“I know what being twenty in the Marines is like, Jack.”
Jack didn’t read the rest of the letter. He slid it across the bar toward Denny. “You’ve been up here for months,” Jack said.
“Yeah. It took me a while to get to know you, then I had to be sure the truth wouldn’t make your life harder, then… Then there was the time it took to get up the courage. Because once I let it out, I couldn’t take it back. You know?”
Jack lifted his shot and threw it back. With shot glass in hand, he pointed at Denny’s drink. “You’d better drink that, son.”
Denny lifted the drink, but paused. “Look, I get it if you say this isn’t the happiest day of your life.”
Jack scowled. “Drink,” he said. When Denny put down the glass Jack said, “Any man would be proud to have you for a son. Any man, me included. I’m just having a real hard time with the facts, with knowing what kind of man I was, that I’d scare a woman off telling me she’s pregnant because I can’t be bothered with the responsibility. And I’m having a real goddamn hard time thinking I had the kind of relationship that would bring me a son and… And I can’t remember her.”
Jack leaned on the bar. “Accidents happen all the time, Denny, but I gotta be honest with you—I was careful. Not stupid careful—I was always armed with protection. When you talked to your mother, did she say anything like that we knew there was a problem? Like a blowout or something?”
“I couldn’t get into that with her, Jack. She was my mother. And she was sick.”
Jack felt his chest go tight. Here he was thinking about himself when this kid had discovered one man was not his father and another was—all when his mother was dying! And he was thinking about whether his condom had a hole in it? “What kind of cancer, Denny?”
“Breast, then it spread. She was so young, she didn’t get checked, didn’t get good medical care. It was an aggressive cancer. We spent five years beating it back then it would pop up somewhere else, then more chemo, then a few good months that looked promising, then— Thing is, she couldn’t beat it. And she wanted me to have the truth before she died.” Denny swallowed. “We don’t have to tell anyone, Jack.”
Jack just shook his head. “That’s not the important thing, Denny. It’s not about keeping it a secret….” He shook his head. “There are some truths about me, son—one of ’em is that until I met Mel, I hadn’t met a woman I was tempted to settle down with, to start a family with, but I never thought of myself as cruel. Maybe I’ve just been lying to myself about that. There must have been a reason your mom wasn’t brave enough to look for me, to tell me about you….”
“Lots of reasons,” Denny said. “She never blamed you. She was with a guy who thought I was his and he wasn’t a nice guy. He never even married her. I can’t think of a thing my mom ever did that was bad or wrong, but he slapped her around anyway. She was too scared of him to tell the truth, to break free and try to find you. By the time he was out of the picture, too many years had passed.”
“It never once occurred to me to tell a woman that even if I didn’t feel like being married, I could be responsible…” Jack’s voice faded out.
“Soldiers, Marines, they do things like that,” Denny said. “I did that. I was with a girl right before Afghanistan and I told her I didn’t want to be worrying about attachments while I was—”
Jack put a hand over his forearm. “Denny, even if I couldn’t have been a husband, I could have been a father. I should have been supporting you, knowing you, teaching you. Not easy for a Marine, a single Marine at that, but I would have liked to have tried. At the least, I could have been there for you when you were losing your mother. I could have been waiting for you to come home from war.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry I didn’t know. But I know now.”
Denny smiled. “Hey. I don’t expect anything. I just wanted to know you, that’s all. Really, I didn’t think I’d be this lucky, to find out you’re a guy I actually like, a guy I’d want for a friend even if there wasn’t any other connection. But Jack, you don’t have to do anything. I like things the way they are.” He grinned boyishly. “I don’t need a kidney or anything. I can support myself just fine.”
Jack poured another couple of shots. “I usually limit myself to one, but it’s a big night. You should move back out to the guesthouse if you want. Rent free, of course.”
“What I want is to take care of myself. It’s what I’d want to do even if you’d been around the past twenty-four years. In fact, from what I know of you so far, I bet it’s what you would have raised me to do.”
Jack lifted his glass. “You’re probably right about that.”
Right at that moment Preacher came into the bar from the kitchen. “I’m gonna have to learn to wash up faster if I want company for that shot,” he said. “You’re getting ahead of me.”
“Let me pour you one,” Jack said. “Wait till you hear the news. Uncle Preacher.”
Mel sat cross-legged on the king-size bed, her laptop pushed to the side, while Jack paced and talked, telling her the story Denny had told him. He would periodically stop pacing, bend at the waist and lean both hands on the bed and add something emphatic. Dramatic. Then he’d pace again.
“Unbelievable,” she finally said. “Then again, not. There’s even a slight resemblance. But then, I took Rick for your son when I first met him. How many more of them do you think are out there?” she asked.
“Do you think you’re being funny?”
“Um, not really,” she said. “I thought I was being a little concerned.”
“Listen, I’m telling you the absolute truth when I say that this is the last thing I expected to hear. I was seriously very, ve
ry cautious. I got an A in biology. I didn’t take chances.”
“Till you got to me?” she asked.
“Frankly, yes! You were entirely different! I was completely in love with you! I wanted to be with you forever! I totally lost my mind!”
“Could you please not raise your voice? First of all, I didn’t do this to you and second, the kids are sleeping.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Jack, condoms aren’t a hundred percent. Sometimes there’s a malfunction—a little hole, a leak, a tear. And, as we’ve proven, you’re pretty potent. Are you worried you’re going to be getting more news like this?”
“Not so much that.” He sat down on the bed. “Mel, I can admit to playing it kind of loose when I was young and there was the occasional real short-term relationship…. Not as many as you might think. But either I’m getting old and losing my memory or I was only with Denny’s mom once or maybe twice. Mel, my girlfriends, such as they were, might not have always been memorable, but I don’t remember Denny’s mom at all. She looks kind of familiar, but I can’t tie her to a single date, event, conversation, anything. And yet, she told Denny all about my family! Not the kind of stuff I share with a girl I’ve been out with once or twice.”
“Denny was around over the holidays, Jack. I’m sure you talked about your family all the time.”
He shook his head. “She told him I had a little sister still in grade school. We must have been close—when I was twenty, Brie was only ten. And she took me being in the Marines real hard.”
“Maybe you were drunk,” Mel said with a shrug.
He straightened. “As a well-known fact, personally and across the board, I didn’t have much sexual success when drunk. I did, however, have blissful memory loss.”
“Maybe it’ll all come back to you. But Jack, are you sure this information is accurate? I mean, maybe the person who’s not remembering real well was Denny’s mom. Although…”
“Although…?” he prompted.
“I have to say, my experience is that women generally know who got them pregnant, unless there were multiple partners in a very tight period of time. Men seem to be more prone to blow off the average encounter while most women take these things very seriously.”
“I know this,” he said. “I know men and women look at things like sex differently and, I admit, I can’t remember the phone number of every woman I slept with, but that letter said she was in love with me. That she fell hard. It happened a time or two—that a woman’s feelings for me were stronger than mine for her, and when that happened, I had to move along before someone got hurt real bad. I have four sisters. I listened to them wail and cry over some dipshit boy who led them on then disappeared, just took what he could get and didn’t call again. I wasn’t going to do that to a girl, so I bit the bullet and broke it off. And when I had to do that it wasn’t easy and I remember every one.”
Mel pulled a face. “I have to give you credit for that, Jack. It’s rare. Most guys would rather leave the country than have an honest conversation about their feelings.”
“Don’t overpraise me. I’m not sure I did a good job of it, but I did fess up that I wouldn’t turn out to be a good boyfriend, that there was no future in me. Hell, I loved the Marines—there really wasn’t room for one other woman in my life.”
“Except your sisters,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, well I was stuck with them,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much I don’t want to tell my dad about this?” He covered his face with his hands, leaning elbows on his knees.
“Well, Jack, given the fact you don’t remember Denny’s mom or the period of time he was conceived, before you tell the whole family and the whole town, I recommend you get a little evidence more concrete than a posthumous letter. You two need to do a little blood test. Make sure you’re related.”
Jack looked devastated. “Aw, Mel, I can’t do that to the kid. Think of all he’s been through. And I’ve known him coming up on six months now and he’s a good young man. Can I really question his dying mother’s confession without hurting him?”
“If you’d gotten this letter a year after he was conceived asking for your involvement and support and didn’t remember being with the mother, wouldn’t you, in the kindest possible way, say you were completely willing, but a blood test would be in the best interest of everyone involved?”
“That would be obvious after only a year,” he said. “The man is twenty-four. He’s lived for this moment. I’ve already disappointed him for a couple of decades. I don’t want to question him even more.”
“I appreciate that and I like him very much. But, Jack, it’s not all about Denny. There’s you, too. And then there’s David and Emma….”
“David and Emma don’t care whether there’s a blood test….”
“They might if they ever need a bone marrow transplant.”
“If there’s ever a medical situation, believe me we’ll jump right on that blood work.”
“Well, this is your situation,” Mel said. “I’m just along for the ride and I have no trouble accepting Denny as your son. Honestly, I have no trouble accepting Rick as your son, though you don’t share a single chromosome—I think of him as a son, too. I was ready to adopt a baby that wouldn’t be ours biologically and I never doubted for a second that we’d love him as much as our own biological children. Jack—keep an open mind. Your relationship with Denny doesn’t have to change. Even though you didn’t bring him up it’s obvious you care about him—no blood test would change that. But it would lend evidence to the claim.” She shrugged. “Could give you both enormous peace of mind.”
Jack was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I’ll keep it in mind. But I know now is not the time.”
Six
Jillian knew she’d see Colin again before too long. She had been thinking about him, knew he was more than a little curious about her, just as she was intrigued by him, but she didn’t expect him to walk right in her back door at six-thirty in the morning. She was standing at the kitchen sink in her pajamas, filling egg cartons with dirt from a big bag of potting soil. She wasn’t wearing sexy pajamas but they were a bit revealing. She was braless and the curve of her breasts was clearly visible. And she was a tiny bit glad.
“Good morning,” she said. “Don’t you knock?”
He lifted his arms—one brown paper grocery sack in each. “No free hands.”
“You could have knocked. You could have used the toe of your boot.”
“I’ll try like hell to remember that. Have you had breakfast?”
“I was just about to eat some Froot Loops.”
“Ugh,” he groaned. “Poison. I’ll make breakfast. What are you doing?”
“Making seed cups. Preacher’s been saving me his egg cartons—they’re perfect.” She brushed the dirt off her hands into the bag. “I’ll move this bag of dirt and get dressed.”
“Not on my account—you look good.” He put his grocery bags on the work island. “I’ll move the dirt to the back porch for you. How do you like your eggs?”
“Benedict?”
“Second choice?”
“Steamed. Medium. Firm whites, plenty of yellow yolk.”
He smiled at her. “You’re trying to trick me. You think I can’t deliver. I’m a pretty good cook. Breakfast is my specialty.” His eyes dropped to her breasts and he seemed to sway slightly; he almost moaned. “Go ahead, get dressed. I’ll get busy in the kitchen.”
She was smiling as she went into the little bedroom off the kitchen and closed the door. Well, they were even now. She’d been caught glancing at his crotch and he’d taken a survey of her chest. She couldn’t miss the reaction—he had paled, and if she was not mistaken, he had subdued a shiver. Since her breasts were completely adequate and still quite perky she assumed he liked them just fine. She never thought of them as anything special but, in the grand scheme of things, they were nicely shaped and large enough for a man’s hands
.
Jillian had been thinking about Colin a lot lately because she was undeniably attracted to him. This wouldn’t have happened in her old life. She’d been too busy while employed at BSS, putting in her sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks. It had been hard to get her attention at all under all the excitement and anxiety of her high-pressure job. Probably one of the only reasons Kurt had burrowed into her romantic life was because they spent so much time working together.
But here, mostly alone, in this completely alien environment, not only did Colin appeal to her in a very basic and earthy way, the idea that they were both transients and wouldn’t be in the same town longer than a few more months was a definite upside as far as she was concerned. She was a long, long way from trusting a man again, but she had discovered, since meeting Colin, that she wasn’t all that far from wanting one.
By the time she pulled on some jeans, a bra and a T-shirt, and had combed her hair and applied a little lip gloss, she could already make out the good smells coming from the kitchen. She followed her nose and sat on one of the two stools at the kitchen island. He was busy at the stove and when he glanced over his shoulder at her, she smiled and said, “Do you suppose we could try something very old-fashioned? Like planning ahead?”
“We could try,” he said. “But if that was a rule, I wouldn’t be here now. And you’d hate that. Plates?” he asked.
She pointed to the cupboard above the stove. And then she just watched in fascination while he moved around her kitchen. She liked the way his butt filled out his jeans—his legs were awful long. So were his arms, she noticed. His hands were big, but he was surprisingly graceful. He fried bacon and sausage together, steamed the eggs, warmed the croissants, pulled a package of smoked salmon from his grocery bag along with a jar of capers and a container of cream cheese and put those in the center of the work island. He opened drawers until he found utensils; he folded paper towels for napkins. And right before sliding the eggs and meat onto plates he quickly, and thinly, sliced a red onion onto a small plate. And voilà! He was sitting down across from her.