Nothing came for free? I was pretty sure that great big house full of flower prints and chandeliers was inherited. But I didn’t say anything. What would be the point?
“Yup, well it’s definitely easier to be motivated when you need to put food on the table and pay the electric bill.”
Des nodded slowly and took a sip of the wine I hadn’t noticed had been placed in front of us. I’d been too busy wondering if my father understood the definition of irony.
“I have a lot of regrets.” He set down his glass and looked me directly in the eye. “Some due to decisions I made, some due to decisions I didn’t.” He sucked in a deep breath like he was trying to alleviate pain. I was filled with rage at the very idea. He wasn’t the victim here. I was. My mom was.
“Like what?” I asked, the Italian blood in my veins jumping all of a sudden.
“Like what regrets do I have?” he clarified. But what I heard was, “Really? You want to go there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it would be good to hear them.”
Our appetizers arrived and went untouched as my father and I sat in silence for too long to be comfortable.
“I regret not standing up to my father when I told him your mother was pregnant.”
This much I knew. My mother had told me that Des’s family never wanted anything to do with her, and that he had scurried back to England on his father’s orders.
“How old were you?” I asked. I was trying to sound interested but I knew myself better than that. I was bound to seem defensive even in the best-case scenario.
“Twenty. Technically an adult. But . . . my father had a lot of power.”
“Because of his money?”
“Partly. And because he was the hub of the family and the family business. I’d always been groomed to take over from him and . . .” He stopped, picked up his knife and fork and took a mouthful of crab.
“I went home to tell my father about the pregnancy and he was very clear. He said I could go back to America and deal with the pregnancy and be with your mother. But he said that doing so would have consequences. I would be cut off from any money he might give me as well as from any contact with my sisters and my mother. Not to mention my future running the family business.”
His father—my grandfather—sounded like a real asshole. But Des had been an adult. He was smart, connected, and had his entire future in front of him. He didn’t need his father. “So you chose the money,” I replied.
Des sighed. “I chose . . . what was familiar. I chose safe.”
“For you,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “I put my own needs first. It was selfish and morally unjustifiable, which was why I pushed it away. Pretended it hadn’t happened. Bought into my mother’s dismissal of your mother as a gold digger.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention, armed and ready for attack. “A gold digger?” I said as calmly as I could manage.
“Of course she wasn’t.” He slid his hand over mine and I snatched it away. My mother was a beautiful woman who had plenty of men who had promised her a comfortable life in exchange for . . . I cringed at the thought. She’d never sold out. She always put me first and led life on her own terms. The last thing she was, was a gold digger. “I never thought that about her. But my family . . . She never knew how wealthy they were, but my father thought the worst of most people.”
“But not Evan,” I said.
“I love Evan, of course I do, but she was also acceptable to my family because of who her family is.”
He was talking like we were living in the Dark Ages.
“So your marriage was . . . arranged?”
“More encouraged, because she was suitable.”
I gave a half-snort of a laugh. “I’m sure an Italian American woman who grew up in a tenement building in Lower Manhattan wasn’t suitable.”
He glanced into his lap. “No.”
“And they assumed she was after your money. Well, newsflash, she wasn’t. Did she ever ask you for anything?”
“I never thought it was about money. We . . . loved each other.”
“Did she ever ask you for anything?” I repeated my question. I needed to know he knew who my mother was.
“Never. She even refused the money I offered for—” He cleared his throat. “I’m trying to be entirely honest with you, Sofia.”
God, it pissed me off when people expected props for honesty. I dug into my plate of crab, avoiding his gaze.
“I made my choice but I wanted to do something—make it right somehow. I had a small amount of savings of my own left in my American account that I wanted to give to her. I thought maybe she could have . . . a . . .”
“An abortion.” I finished for him. My mother had told me he’d offered her a little cash the last time they spoke, but she’d turned it down. My mother was a proud woman so it hadn’t surprised me she hadn’t taken it, but I’d also resented her for it. Maybe life would have been easier back then if we’d had a little more. But now her refusal made more sense. It was money to get rid of me. There was no way she would have touched it. Not only was my mother Catholic, but she’d always told me that she knew the moment she was pregnant and had loved me from that second, even when I was just a few measly cells. That knowledge had always made me feel safe—completely sure of her unconditional love for me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I didn’t blame him for wanting her to get an abortion. They were young and I was in no way planned. What I had a problem with was that if she chose not to have the abortion, where was the money?
“I was just trying to do something and your mother—”
I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the fact he was talking about her. He had no right to. She was a thousand times the person he would ever be.
“She chose to keep her daughter.”
“She did. And she’s done a great job bringing you up.”
I nodded. “She has. But it was hard. And she . . .” My mother wouldn’t want me to be talking to Des, let alone describing how we’d suffered. How she’d sacrificed her life for me. She would bat away my questions and tell me there was nothing on earth she would rather do than raise me to be a strong, independent woman. What was I doing here? She would rather cut off her leg than take money from the man who sat opposite me.
“I think I should leave,” I said, rooted to my seat, wanting to go and figure out these tangled, confused feelings. Meeting my father and getting to a point in our relationship where I could ask him for money was meant to be like a job. A mission. Get in, get what I wanted, get out. I’d obviously been naïve, but I honestly hadn’t expected to enter an emotional maelstrom. I’d always managed to keep thoughts about my father in a box tucked safely away in an abandoned corner of my mind. There was no need to open that box because he wasn’t part of my life. My mother was my parent. She loved me. That’s all that mattered. My father had been nothing but a sperm donor. But being here in front of him changed things. Now I wanted to understand how he could have walked away from a child—his child. Me. I sort of understood that at twenty he didn’t have his shit together and didn’t want to go against his family. But at some point, he’d become a man.