Her mother paused, then said defensively, “He wouldn’t have been a good dad, Nina. He was a player, he was full of himself, he had a wife.”
“A wife is not a character trait, Mom. And what about you, sleeping with a married man? What the hell? What about hos before bros, dude?”
“I beg your pardon? Nina Lee Hill, did you just call me a ho?”
Nina laughed, suddenly, and tossed her pencil away. Her mother always made things seem lighter. It was partly her Australian accent and general “let’s get on with it and stop making a fuss” approach to everything, and partly her personality. Candice Hill had no patience for drama, or overblown feelings, really, of any kind. Which made her superficial and frustrating if, like Nina, you wanted to have a conversation about emotional topics like discovering your entire life had been a lie, but which also made things clunk back into perspective.
“No, Mom, I didn’t call you a ho, but please could you take a second to think about how this might feel to me?”
Candice clicked her tongue. “Nina, this all happened nearly thirty years ago. Your father was very handsome; we met on a photo shoot of some kind, I don’t even remember; we stayed in my apartment for a long weekend; and then I found out he had a wife, who was actually pregnant at the time if I remember rightly; so I cut him off and moved on. Two months later, I found out I was pregnant and decided to keep you. He wasn’t really part of any of it except for a sweaty forty-eight hours at the start.”
Nina badly wanted to cover her ears and say la la la, but she was holding the phone.
Candice continued, “I had enough money and time to take care of you, and I didn’t want him involved, because I didn’t know him at all and he’d already exhibited bad judgment by cheating on his wife, so I made him sign something promising to leave you alone and that was that. I never saw him again. I’m amazed he even remembered my name.”
“Well, to be fair, Mom, your name might have been slightly less memorable than the fact he had an actual child. That one’s a little harder to forget.” Not everyone finds it as easy as you did.
“What a pain in the ass. I knew he was bad news.”
“It would have been better if he hadn’t been news at all. I hate surprises; you know that.”
“Yeah, I know, which is something you must have inherited from him, because I love surprises.”
Nina rolled her eyes. “We were talking about me.”
“I have to go. Are we done here?”
“Yeah. Any chance you’re going to say, ‘Sorry, Nina, you’re right, I should have prepared you for this sudden shock’?”
Her mother made a huffy noise. “None. I didn’t expect him to break his word after three decades. If anyone owes you an apology, it’s him.”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“Serves him right.” Candice sighed. “I’m sorry he was a loser, Nina. But you’re a big girl now; you can handle this.” And with that she hung up.
Nina sighed and wondered if she would ever be a mom herself and, if she were, would she be any better at it than her own mother was. As a child, Nina had been sad her mother wasn’t there, because everyone else seemed to think it was sad. Then, as a teenager, she’d been angry with her absent mother and blamed her for her own anxiety and shyness. Now, as an adult, she’d come to the conclusion that her mother being away all the time had probably been a blessing. Her nanny, Louise, had been a wonderful mother, and her mother had been a wonderful photographer. Biology is not destiny, and love is not proportionate to shared DNA. Of course, she reflected, as she put down the phone and returned to the store, she could be totally wrong about this. She was wrong about so many things.
Five
In which Nina attends a book club meeting
and gets an e-mail.
Nina went home after work and Googled the crap out of William Reynolds. It was a common name, but she decided he couldn’t have been a professional tennis player from the early twentieth century, or an English lord of the seventeenth century, and was more likely to have been this lawyer guy who lived in Los Angeles until he died a week or two earlier. She guessed she’d missed the funeral. Seeing as she’d missed everything else, this wasn’t a stinger. All the obit said was he’d been seventy-eight and was survived by a widow and young daughter. She knew the last part wasn’t accurate, although she’d already forgotten how many children there actually were. She found a few pictures of him online, usually attending a charity function of some kind, always in a tux. He didn’t remind her of herself, but, to be fair, she was a slender twenty-nine-year-old woman with dark red hair and freckles, and he had been a rounded old man with white hair and wrinkles, so it wasn’t exactly apples to apples. More like grapes to raisins.
Nina wondered if she and her siblings would like each other, and if they’d have things in common, like a fondness for The Simpsons and sandwiches. Maybe they’d become good friends, or maybe they’d start a family feud like a TV reality show. She drifted off for a moment creating title sequences for Reynolds vs. Hill: Sibling Wars, which for some reason had mid-’80s synthesizer theme music and the kind of credits that whoosh in from the side. Would she appear as herself, or would she be played by someone more telegenic? She didn’t photograph well, which was a bigger problem for her generation than it had been for any generation prior. Her friend Leah, who was all about Building a Personal Brand, had told her to keep still more often.
“Your face is too mobile,” she’d explained.
“I’m talking and laughing and being an Active Listener,” Nina had replied.
“Well, quit it, because you look like you’ve been poked with a pin in every picture.” She’d pulled some faces to illustrate her point.
“I do not look like that,” protested Nina.
“You do. I have photographic evidence. You might only look like that for a few seconds at a time, but that’s when the shutter clicked, so to speak, so that’s what you look like online.”
“Well, great, I can use it as a first line of defense. If a guy doesn’t look beyond my pained expression to see the real, pain-free me, then he’s not good enough to date me.”
Leah had shrugged. “Or you’ll filter out the regular guys and be left with those that like seeing women in pain, and then who’s going to be sorry?”
Remembering this conversation now, Nina decided William Reynolds must have had similar advice, because if he’d ever smiled or laughed or actively listened in his life, the photographer never caught it.
It had taken Nina quite some time to investigate the state of Los Angeles book clubs, and after months of study, she’d decided to form one club that discussed a different genre each week, rather than four different clubs that each met once a month.
First Wednesday of each month was Book Bitches (contemporary fiction).
Second Wednesday was Sneaky Spinsters (Golden Age mysteries).
Third Wednesday was District Zero (young adult fiction).
Fourth Wednesday was the Electric Sheep Grazing Club (science fiction).
If there was a fifth Wednesday in the month, she would wing it, because she liked to live dangerously. Book nerds are daredevils, as you know.