a paper bag holding all her worldly goods, no education to speak of, an addiction problem, and no hope—no hope at all. Not to mention a broken heart.
And what about Athena? If and when we could locate Petey Mayfield and get him to sign that relinquishment form, Athena would be going off to Jasper, Texas, to live with a loving but impoverished grandfather who would probably be in his late seventies before the child even graduated from high school. Poor Athena. It looked to me as though she, like her mother, was starting life from way behind go.
Reviewing my pantheon of past sins wasn’t much fun. Had booze played a part in what happened back then between Jasmine Day and me? The answer to that was easy—of course it had. I finally sobered up and started working my Twelve Steps in AA, but when I got to Step 8, the one where you’re supposed to draw up a list of the people you’ve harmed and then make amends to them, Jasmine’s name didn’t find its way onto the list. I had put her completely out of my mind.
But what if I’d known about Naomi from the get-go? What would I have done then? Would I have tried to interfere in their lives? Would I have offered to pay child support? When she started getting into hot water as a teenager, would I have tossed my two cents into the mix or tried showing up with a magic-wand checkbook in hand and hoping a bribe would work when discipline and direction hadn’t? I doubt that throwing money at the problem back then would have helped. As for any well-thought-out advice I might have offered? We all know that when it comes to kids and discipline, those skills aren’t in my wheelhouse.
So I tossed and turned, pounding my pillow and brimming over with a whole catalog of woulda, coulda, and shoulda interior debates. Finally, sometime around three in the morning, I fought my way through to a possible solution. I hadn’t helped with raising Naomi because—God help me—I didn’t know she existed. But I knew about her now, and I knew about Athena too, and I needed to make up for lost time. Once Karen and I divorced, hard as it might have been, I never once missed a child-support payment. With Naomi and Athena, I wanted to cover all the back payments I had missed, and with Anne Corley’s assistance I would do so—starting that very day.
Once that decision was made, I was finally able to fall asleep.
Chapter 21
ON SATURDAY MORNING IT WASN’T ATHENA’S CRIES THAT woke me. And it wasn’t the aroma of eggs and bacon either. It was a ding from my cell phone announcing the arrival of an incoming text. When I opened my phone to check, the phone number might have been unfamiliar, but the photo wasn’t. I recognized Loretta Hawk’s smiling face and squash-blossom necklace right away.
“For ten thousand bucks, I figured I could afford to cough up a little overtime. Your profiles are ready to rumble. Where do you want me to send them?”
I left the message app and called the number on the screen. “What would you say if I said I needed one additional DNA profile?” I asked when Loretta answered.
“You’re telling me that three profiles aren’t enough?”
“When I brought them to you, it was with the hope of establishing familial DNA connections to a baby who’d been abandoned as a newborn in a local hospital.”
“Yes, I remember,” Loretta said. “The baby’s name is Athena, right?”
“Correct,” I replied. “She’s cheek-swab letter A.”
“Then we’ve established a complete family grouping,” Loretta told me. “Swab B belongs to Athena’s maternal grandfather. DNA obtained from the hairbrush comes out as Athena’s paternal great-grandmother. So what do you want me to do with these?”
I couldn’t answer right that moment because I had my own answer. DNA doesn’t lie. Like it or not, I truly was Naomi Day’s biological father. And now that I had incontrovertible proof of that, what the hell was I supposed to do with it?
“Hello?” Loretta said into the silence. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“All right, then,” she said, “You still haven’t told me where you want me to send the results.”
“When I know that for sure, I’ll let you know. In the meantime hang on to them for me. But here’s the deal: I’ve now found a possible source for DNA material from the guy himself, from Petey, Athena’s father. The problem is, he