I try to plow on with my angry tirade, but everything Mom just told me flashes through my head along with the poster on the shop’s door. It’s muddling things, and I’m getting rattled.
“And now …” I continue, though not as surefooted. “Now it almost sounds like you’re accusing him of things, and I don’t know what to believe, but it’s confusing, because I haven’t heard his side of the story, and … it’s not fair. It’s not fair that you’ve kept me from him all these years.”
“I haven’t kept you from Henry Zabka,” she says, biting out every word as if she’s barely able to control the anger in her voice. “You want to be a part of his family? It’s bigger than you think. Your so-called father has three kids in three states. I wasn’t the first teenage girl to model for Henry Zabka, okay? He was a creep, Josie.”
“What?” I say, blinking away shock.
“He may be a genius, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a goddamn loser. He preyed on me—I didn’t know it until years later that there were others, okay? That’s why he lost his teaching job. Because he was an asshole who had a thing for college students. So he doesn’t want you because he never wanted to be a father.”
“That can’t be true,” I say, tears slipping down my cheeks.
“That’s what I thought too, back then. He didn’t want his name on your birth certificate. He said he’d make my life a living hell if I tried to get child support out of him—because he had nude photos of me, and what kind of mother does that?
“Josie,” she says, eyes glossy with unshed tears. “What do you think your grandmother and I were fighting about when we left Beauty five years ago?”
“I—I …” My breath comes faster. Thinking about that terrible night is the last thing I want to do, but it comes back to me now, unbidden. Waking up in the middle of their argument. Grandma shouting. Mom crying … Red and blue lights flashing outside the window on the street below.
Mom told me to pack as fast as I could. Only my favorite clothes and the stuff I’d need for a week. A short trip, until we figured things out. That’s what she told me. She said not to listen to what I heard—that none of it was true.
She told me to hurry.
Not to bother to get to dressed.
Grandma was having a breakdown.
No one was getting arrested.
Everything was going to be okay.
We’d call Lucky from the road.
We were coming back when things cooled off.
A week.
Two weeks.
A month.
Five years.
Mom stares at me now over the bookshop counter. “Five years ago, Henry Zabka was still working at the university. Your grandmother was trying to pressure me to get child support out of him, and when I refused, she went behind my back and hired a private detective to look into him.”
A private detective … Briefly, my head fills up with the scent of Christmas that always wafts from the hand-dipped colonial candle store down the alley—and the empty door next to it with the bright red FOR RENT sign. Former office of Desmond Banks, private investigator.
“A detective? Like a PI?” I ask.
She nods. “And he uncovered … all kinds of nasty things about Henry Zabka.”
The argument.
The big blowup that sent us fleeing Beauty in the middle of the night.
The argument was a little bit about me, yes.
But it was really about my father.
I shake my head as tears fall. “No, no, no.”
“I tried to keep you away from it,” she says, taking off her glasses again to wipe at her eyes. “I tried so hard. I didn’t want you to hate him like I hated him. I didn’t even want to believe it myself. I thought it was just your grandmother trying to be controlling. She’s done that before with my life. This wasn’t the first time the meddlesome old bat tried to ruin my relationship with someone—”
Her voice breaks.
She swallows and starts again.
“However, I took a second look at what her private detective uncovered, and … it was pretty damning. A few months later, I contacted the university and got him fired. Well. Quietly dismissed—that’s what they called it. They promised he’d never know it was me who came forward, if I agreed not to sue. That’s when he went back to LA and his career really took off. Which was depressing, honestly. It felt like he was being rewarded, and we