It had all been a lie, my mother confessed that day. My father actually worked at the JCPenney corporate office in Plano fucking Texas. Not only that, but he had another family who didn’t know we existed. A wife and two other daughters. Ashley and Olivia.
“How old are they?” I asked, reeling, expecting her to say that they were babies. That my father had cheated on her, then left her for the other woman.
Instead, she told me they were ten and thirteen.
“Thirteen!” I said, doing the obvious math. “So he was married when you met him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know he was married?” I asked, replaying their airport Starbucks meet-cute story.
She looked down and nodded.
“Then why did you like him?” I asked, aghast.
“It was love at first sight,” she said. “And sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants.”
My stomach turned at her flimsy explanation. I could only imagine the consequences of me doing something wrong, like shoplifting, then saying, Sorry, Mom. But sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants.
“Do you still love him?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re very much in love.”
“Then why isn’t he with you? Why doesn’t he get a divorce and live with us?”
My mother sighed and said, “It’s complicated, Lainey-bug. Sometimes I get angry, but I have to accept the responsibility for my decisions, too.”
I stared at her, processing that I was part of that responsibility. Having me. Raising me by herself. Hell, I was a product of their wrongdoing. I told her I needed to be alone, then went to my room.
That night, as I lay in bed, I connected all the dots. The real reason that I didn’t have my dad’s phone number or address and that he’d never met any of my friends or gone to any of my school plays or dance recitals. I then realized that he was doing those regular, fatherly things with Ashley and Olivia, and I felt my first wave of jealousy. It was so ironic. I’d always longed for a sister. Now I had two, and I was miserable.
Over the weeks, months, and years that followed, my resentment and anger grew. Whenever my father came to visit, I refused to see him, spending the night with a friend.
From that point on, when anyone asked about my father, I simply said he was “out of the picture.” It was what I told Hannah, Tyson, and Summer on the night we met, and they all had the good sense not to ask any follow-up questions.
For the entirety of our first year, he was never mentioned again. Then one night early in our second year, Hannah came to talk to Summer and me, distraught over something her mother had done or said to her. I don’t remember the specifics, only that Summer and I were both appalled.
“Y’all are so lucky to have such nice mothers,” Hannah said. “I can’t imagine that—”
Summer gave her a sympathetic nod, then said, “You have to remember, though, Han, no family is perfect.”
“Yours is,” I said, thinking of all the care packages her mother sent and how supportive both her parents were about her running, flying in from Chicago for most of her races. She was very close to her brother, too, a senior at Princeton who was also a star runner. In fact, she seemed to worship him.
“I love my family,” Summer said. “But my parents constantly compare me to my brother. It’s like nothing I do is ever good enough.”
I stared at her in disbelief. How could anyone outshine Summer? She was a star. She was the sun. It was like hearing that Gisele Bündchen had a prettier sister. Frankly, it also explained a lot about Summer’s perfectionism and the pressure she put on herself.
“Nothing is ever really what it seems,” Summer added, a worried look on her face.
In that moment, I blurted out the truth about my father.
Hannah looked stunned and clearly had no idea what to say. But Summer immediately hugged me, then asked a series of calm questions, most of them about my sisters and what I knew about them. I confessed that I occasionally stalked their Facebook pages. Although their profiles were set to private, I knew that Ashley attended Texas Christian University and that Olivia was still in high school, playing tennis on the junior circuit. “I think she’s at one of those sports academies,” I added.
“Do you think you’ll ever reach out to them?” Summer asked.
“I doubt it. Let sleeping dogs lie, right?”
“I don’t know about that,” Summer said. “I can understand that point of view, but there’s a huge potential upside.”
“And what would that be?” I asked.
“Having a relationship with your sisters,” Summer said.
“I doubt that would happen. It’s not like I’d be happy news.”
“Maybe not at first, but they can’t be upset with you.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I said.
Summer frowned, clearly deep in thought, then said, “Maybe you should talk to Tyson about this. He always gives great advice.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say.
A few nights later, I brought him into the circle of trust. He was predictably furious at my father. Tyson had no patience for liars or cheaters. In his own life, he played by all the rules, once remarking that as a Black man, he had “zero room for error” and needed to be “beyond reproach.” In all situations. It didn’t come across as a complaint—more of an observation or fact, something he said his parents had ingrained in him from a very young age. Beyond the universal rules that everyone had to follow, there was a matrix of additional guidelines for him. In stores, for example, he was taught to make direct eye contact with the clerks; to never put his hands in his pockets; and to always get a receipt, no matter how small the purchase.
“You can’t let your father keep getting away with this, Lainey,” he said. “You need to out that son of a bitch.”
“It’s not my secret to tell.”
