the car. She’s been completely supportive of my decision to go meet Michael, but I can tell there’s a part of her that’s worried. Whether it’s worry that I’ll find some spark I’ve been missing in my relationship with her, or that Michael won’t be as receptive to me as I hope he will, or that even if he is, I won’t get the answers I’m looking for, I can’t tell.
“I don’t think so. I’d rather say whatever I need to say in one shot, instead of splitting it up between phone conversations and stuff.”
She closes the trunk. “What is it that you’re going to say?”
“I haven’t really gotten that far yet.”
She pulls me into a hug and holds me tighter than usual. “Good luck, Ryden. Call me if you need anything. Drive safely. I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
“And I love you, little monster,” she says, nuzzling her nose against Hope’s. “Have fun, you guys.”
I swing by Joni’s, load her and her bag into the car, and hit the highway. I hand her my phone. “You’re in charge of the GPS,” I tell her. “I already input the address into the system, but let me know when there are turns coming up. It’s almost a six-hour drive, so we’ll have to stop for diaper-change breaks. And you can have control of the radio if you want. I don’t really care what we listen to. No hip-hop though.”
She flips to the same pop/rock station my mom always listens to and starts singing along with a Katy Perry song. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have relinquished control of the radio quite so easily.
A while later, when we lose the station, instead of searching for another, Joni turns it off.
“What are you going to say when you meet him?” she asks.
That’s the Question of the Day. “I don’t know.” I’d hoped all the driving would help me come up with something. So far, it hasn’t.
“Okay,” she says. “Why do you want to meet him?”
The answer hits my lips automatically. “I feel like I won’t ever truly know how to be a dad until I meet mine.”
“But you’re—”
“I know what you’re going to say. Don’t.”
“What?”
“You’re going to say that I’m already a good dad and he won’t be able to tell me anything I don’t already know.”
“Yep, that’s pretty much exactly what I was going to say.”
We drive in silence for a long time after that.
Well, sort of silence.
Because there’s been this quiet hum in my head ever since I laid eyes on Michael’s contact info, and the closer I get to him, the louder it’s becoming. The hum grows into a full-on chorus, a chorus of people I know. And all the things they’ve told me—all the advice I refused to listen to—are suddenly resounding in my brain in multipart harmony:
Joni insisting I’m already doing an okay job at being a dad. I mean, the last few weeks have been better. Hope doesn’t seem to hate me lately. Could it have been my anger and guilt she was sensing and reacting to this whole time? Maybe I’ve been doing better, so she has too?
And that thing Alan said. How I was obsessing so much over finding the journals, finding Michael, finding the mystical secret to fatherhood, that I was completely missing the point. That my quest to become a good dad was actually making me a bad one.
And my mom, the way she looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I told her I thought Michael, someone who knew he had a kid on the way and left anyway, could help me figure out how to be a parent while my own mother couldn’t.
I pull over onto the side of the highway, flip on my hazards, bring my head to the steering wheel, and squeeze my eyes tight, trying to think.
“Hey, Joni?”
“Yo.”
“Can you Google something for me?”
“Sure. What?”
“Michael Taylor, Edison, New Jersey. Do an image search.”
I can feel Joni’s questioning stare burning a hole into the side of my face, but I don’t open my eyes.
A few minutes later, she says, “Got it.”
I lift my head and take the phone from her. There he is: a good-looking, late-thirtyish guy with olive skin, brown eyes, slicked-back black hair, and glasses. He looks familiar in the most unfamiliar way possible. I’ve never seen him before in my life, but I’ve seen pieces of him every day in the mirror. My nose is his nose, my smile is his smile.