An interminable minute later, and they had their beverages.
It was almost four, and already getting dark. Josh followed his father to the booth farthest in the back. They took off their coats and sat. It was a nice pub. Rather ordinary, but homey.
“So this is . . . quite a surprise,” Christopher said, taking a big breath.
“I’m sure it is.”
“How old are you, Joshua?”
“Thirty-one as of October fourteenth.” The worst birthday of his life, this last one. The first without Lauren. The first as a widower.
“Jesus. God. I . . .” He took a long pull of his club soda. “I guess I should ask what you’d like to . . . do. Or say.”
“I wanted to meet you. Ask you a few things.”
“Right. Right. Of course.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Sorry, this is a lot to take in.” Another swallow or two of club soda. “Uh . . . how is your . . . your mother?”
“Alive. That’s all you get to know.”
Christopher flinched. “Fair enough.”
“I know you’re married and have three children with cowboy names. I know where you grew up, where you went to school, that you have a sister named Eileen. I know your parents sold their farm in Indiana and now live in Arizona. I know you owned a café in Wicker Park.”
“Jesus, the internet really does tell all.” He blew out a breath. “Do you want money?”
Josh couldn’t help a bitter laugh. “It’s a little late for child support.”
“I mean, I do owe you. And there is money. Now. There wasn’t always. The farm sold—”
“I know, and I don’t care. I want you to tell me how you could leave a pregnant twenty-year-old and your unborn child.”
Christopher M. Zane leaned back in his seat and looked at the ceiling for a long minute. When he looked back at Josh, his eyes were full of tears.
“I don’t have a good answer for that. There is no answer, other than I was a shitty, stupid kid—”
“You were twenty-five.”
“And as immature and stupid as a sixteen-year-old.” He drained his club soda. “Let me text my wife and tell her I’ll be late. Hang on a sec.”
Josh waited.
Christopher texted, then turned off his phone and put it in his coat pocket. Josh appreciated that. The man took another deep breath. “Listen, I can’t justify what I did. Walking away, I mean. I didn’t plan it. I was taking part in a summer project in Austin that year, and I fully intended to go back to Boston. And then I stopped home in Indiana. I hadn’t told my parents about . . . you. Or Stephanie.” He looked at his hands. “They . . . my parents, that is . . . they were so happy to see me.”
Josh waited. “My father immigrated from Pakistan when he was seventeen.” Ah. So that’s where Josh got his dark hair and eyes. “He worked ninety hours a week for ten years as a janitor and a farmhand before he could buy his first piece of land. Thirteen acres. He ended up with eight thousand. I was the first person on either side of the family to finish college. My mom didn’t even finish high school.”
Christopher stopped to let that sink in. Or just to gather his nerves, maybe. Josh had to hand it to him; he wasn’t tap-dancing around.
Josh wasn’t really here to listen to the story of his invisible grandparents and their American dream, but it was interesting. Pakistan. He was Pakistani. Cool. He’d have to do some reading on the culture and history. After all, it wasn’t his ancestors who’d dumped his mom.
“Is your mother also Pakistani?” Josh asked.
“No. She’s white. Her parents didn’t approve of her dating a . . . well, they had ugly words for my father. So they kicked her out, and they got married when they were really young.”
“You think they’d approve of you walking out on your pregnant girlfriend?” Josh asked, his voice almost amiable.
“God, no. I never told them. They . . . were so proud of me. I was supposed to be proof that they’d made all the right choices. I wasn’t supposed to be an idiot and get a girl pregnant.”
“And yet you did.”
“Yes. Joshua, I have no excuses here. I was scared and selfish and entitled and weak. I couldn’t go back to MIT, and so I dropped out. I—” His voice broke. “I just stayed. Like a coward. Like a selfish asshole.”
He wiped his eyes. Josh was unmoved.
“The longer I stayed, the easier it got. I told myself your mother would go back to Sweden.”
“Why would she go to Sweden?” Josh asked. “She grew up in central New York. She spent one semester in Sweden. She’s a second-generation American. She knows maybe ten Swedish words.”
“Oh. I . . . I thought she was from Sweden, for some reason.”
“Wrong.”
“Well. It doesn’t excuse what I did. But that’s what I told myself. She was back there, they had . . . uh, better healthcare and, oh, shit, I was so stupid and self-centered and grasping at any straws. Call it magical thinking or wish fulfillment or me just pretending she’d floated off to a better life, becoming a doctor. After a while, I believed it. I pictured her in Sweden, having the baby—you—there, raising you there.”
“She moved to Providence. Transferred to Brown, because they gave her more money than Harvard. I was born at Rhode Island Hospital. She didn’t go to medical school. She couldn’t, not with me.” He let the guilt sink in. “She kept her old post office box in case you ever reached out.”
There was a long silence.
“I never did,” his father acknowledged.
“I’m well aware of that.”
Christopher M. Zane had a hard time making eye contact. “I want to tell you that . . . my decision haunted me. Not that I did anything about it other than drink. I hated myself. I flunked out of my master’s program and had to restart a year later. I knew I was being weak, but . . .” He shook his head. “But the longer it went on, the harder it felt to undo any of the harm I did. Eventually, I told myself you were both better off without me showing up and begging for forgiveness, because what I did was . . . unforgivable.”
“Did you even know that I was a boy? Did you bother to find out?”
His father looked at him, blinking. More tears fell from his eyes, Josh observed impassively. “No,” Christopher M. Zane said. “Once a certain amount of time had passed, I told myself it was for the best.”
“For you, clearly it was.”