“I’ll be there next time so I can ask follow-ups.” He blew his nose. “How am I doing with the sick thing? Am I better than Hangnail Morgan?”
“You still don’t sound very good,” I pointed out.
“I’ll be one hundred percent tomorrow.”
“I hope so, because we’re going to dinner at Lindy Nyland’s house,” I reminded him.
“A friend of mine is going to be there, too,” he said, and sneezed. “I’ll definitely be fine tomorrow,” he repeated, when I looked at him with raised eyebrows.
I felt his forehead, and thought he was only a maybe on the dinner. I got up to make him more tea.
“How long did you guys use this code for?” César asked, studying my paper.
“At least a few years. Soleil and I traveled all over the place, all year long, and I’d send postcards home. Ellie and I used to mail each other letters even when we were back in town.” Ellie, whom I hadn’t spoken to since we’d hung up on Sunday.
“What about her job? How did your mom work with you guys traveling like that?”
“She didn’t. Warren Wilde supported us, which I didn’t understand until I was a lot older. He paid for everything, including my college tuition, but I’m making it up.”
“What do you mean?” César asked.
“I’ll show you.” I opened my phone to a list I had made, a long accounting of all that I owed to my father. “It’s going to take me the rest of my life to pay him all this but I’m not going to be in his debt.”
César took the phone. “Red Pine school, thirteen years, four years of college tuition, vacations, rent, a car…”
“I gave that back to him,” I said. “I left it in his driveway. For everything else, I added it all up and I send him a check every month. It’s why I’m always broke, but I have to.”
“He actually deposits your checks? That’s unbelievable! What a prick,” César said angrily. “Stop sending money to him! He spent it on you and never said it was a loan, and as far as I’m concerned, that means it was yours to keep.” He scrolled more through my list of what I owed to Warren, and I also saw him looking at where I had calculated out all my monthly expenses. He didn’t comment on my relative poverty, relative to him in his giant, pink marble house. “I can’t imagine my daughter trying to pay me back for her education,” was all he said. “My parents certainly didn’t expect that from me or my sister.”
“I think I’ve pointed out before that we were raised a little differently,” I noted. “Like, your parents loved and wanted you. Soleil and I were good friends, and I thought she was really fun and cool, but she wasn’t really a mom. Warren Wilde, my uncle, was the closest thing I had to a parent—ironic, since he really was my dad, but he was hiding it from me.” I sighed. “Parents suck.”
“Mine don’t.”
“Lucky for you.” I put my hand on his forehead again, like I was testing for fever, but mostly it was because I felt terrible talking about all this, and I wanted to touch him.
He took my hand and held it instead. “I’m fine. I wish I had gone with you to the doctor.”
“It’s better that you rested so you can be ready to get your butt kicked by the Junior Woodsmen in practice, like I saw the other day.”
He smiled. “Come by tomorrow before we go to dinner and you’ll get to see that happen again.”
“First, dinner tonight,” I said. “Are you hungry at all? I’ll make something.”
“You’re going to cook?” he asked, shocked.
“It won’t be César-level gourmet, but we’ll be able to eat it.” I started to get up, but he held on to my hand.
“Camdyn, about my parents. They’re going to be visiting my sister in Tampa and they really want us to fly down,” César told me. “It’s very important to me that you meet them.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” he said. “You’re the mother of my baby.”
“Of course, the mother of your baby,” I echoed. I was the baby-carrier, that was all.
“You’re going to be in our lives for a long time, and I want them to feel comfortable with you.”
That felt worse, somehow. “I already told you that I don’t—”
“I bought tickets for us to go to Florida,” he announced.
“You already bought tickets?” I asked, astounded.
He just nodded. “You can take a Friday off, right? I had to work it into the practice schedules we set up and now an exhibition game we’re going to play.” He looked at me, staring at the big shirt I wore. “I wanted to go sooner rather than later. You may not want to travel after a while.”
“I—I—” I broke off. “No, I’m not going to Florida. Absolutely not!”
“Why?” he asked calmly. “Think of it as a vacation, a weekend in warm weather.”
“No,” I said again. “I don’t want to go.”
“Fine,” he agreed. “Then I’ll fly everyone up here for a few weeks. To stay with us.”
Touché. I glared at him. “Are you planning to sleep at your sister’s house?”
“No, we’ll stay at my house. That’s where I usually am during the off-season and there’s plenty of room.”
He had thought it all out. “You can stay wherever you want, but if I go, I’ll stay in a hotel that I’ll choose. And that I’ll pay for,” I said instead.
“That’s silly,” César dismissed me. “You just showed me your budget and you don’t have any money after paying off your dad. We’re going and we’ll both stay at my house, together.”
I pulled my hand away from his and made dinner, which was not very good despite my efforts, and which we ate in silence. He was clearly pissed at me for not wanting to meet his family, and I was pissed right back for the way he had engineered it. I
