He Cheated With My Friend, My Parents Helped novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Not at This Address

My father stood up when I came up the walk.

He looked older than he had at the shower, and smaller, in the gray light before dawn.

"Jeanie."

"Dad."

"I know it's early."

"It's five-thirty."

"Your mother thinks I'm walking the dog," he said. "We don't have a dog."

I unlocked the door and held it open.

He took off his shoes in the hall, which he had always done, and followed me into the kitchen in his socks.

I didn't offer him coffee.

I stood on one side of the table, and he stood on the other.

"I saw the Tacoma place," I said. "I read the envelopes."

His shoulders dropped.

"I know. The old man called me last night."

"Then you know what I want to ask."

"Why I sent them back."

"Yes."

He sat down heavily and put his big hands flat on the wood.

"I was thirty-one," he said. "I'd just been made assistant principal. Your mother had a ring and a date, and I'd kept Simone's mother a secret for two years."

"You kept your daughter a secret."

"Yes."

"For your job."

"For your mother," he said. "She would have left. I believed that for thirty years, and I never once tested it."

"And Simone's mother?"

"I told myself she'd manage. She was proud. She never asked me for money."

"She asked you to read her letters."

His mouth worked.

"I know," he said.

He didn't ask me to forgive him.

I'd been ready for that, with my answer worked out in the car.

Without it, I had nothing to say.

"When Simone found me at twenty I was in my office at the school," he said. "She stood in the door with a shoebox. She didn't say anything. I knew her face the way I know my own."

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