“No long face. I feel great,” I tried to tell Lyle breezily, but it came off like more of a question.
“What’s the matter with you, Camdyn?” he asked, hands on his hips. “What did that big boy do?’
“Are you talking about César? He didn’t do anything! He’s wonderful!” Jesus and Mary, I was going to cry at work. I remembered Euna making fun of me about that when I had quit at the winery, so I looked up at a ceiling light to get my tears under control. It took a while for that to happen and I stared seeing spots. I wobbled a little on my feet as I focused back down on Lyle.
He grabbed my arm. “Does this have something to do with your father being here?”
“Warren Wilde is here at the stadium? Where?”
Lyle motioned with his head. “He’s in with the CEO and GM. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I don’t keep track of the higher-ups.”
Lyle kept track of everyone. “I really, really don’t want to see him,” I said. “I’m going to my office to hide. Will you text me and tell me when he’s leaving so that I can avoid him?”
He nodded. “I’m going to walk you back to that closet, too. Tell me what’s the matter.”
I thought while we went down the hallway. “Have you ever made a gigantic mistake with someone?” I asked him. “Like, you did something awful to someone you cared about?”
“Let me put it to you this way: I’ve been married three times. I know a little too much about hurting people I loved,” he answered.
“Ok, well, I think I did that to someone,” I said. “I think I made him believe something about me that isn’t true, like that I’m someone I’m not.”
“What do you think you’re not?” Lyle asked me.
“I think I’m not the kind of person to settle for…to settle down with one guy. I think I’m too interested in my freedom. I think I’m like Soleil,” I concluded. Which also meant that I’d be a terrible mother, but that was a worry for another day. “You know that she was never with someone long-term.”
“Your mom?” Lyle asked me. “You think she was that way?”
He sounded so skeptical that I stopped in the hallway to look at his face. “You think she wasn’t?” I asked. “Don’t you remember how many different guys she dated?”
“Sure, but there was really only one man for her,” he answered.
“For Soleil?” I asked incredulously. “One man? There were hundreds!”
“Maybe she moved through a few, but her heart wasn’t in it. You really didn’t notice when you were older, not even when you were in high school? Or when you came home from college?”
I stared at him. “Notice what?”
Lyle shook his head. “From the moment I met her, I saw that Soleil was one hundred percent crazy over her sister’s husband.”
“Wait, are you kidding? Do you seriously think that my mother was in love with Warren Wilde?”
“It used to be kind of a joke around here when he played for the team, how he would travel around with both of them like a harem…it’s not funny, now,” Lyle added quickly. “But yeah, we all knew that Soleil was in love with Warren Wilde. I would bet I’m not the only person who worked in this stadium who saw you and wondered about who your daddy was, no matter what Soleil used to say about soldiers and sailors and cowboys.”
I heard deep voices down the hall and it reminded me that my father wasn’t some abstract concept; he was here in one of these offices, today. “I have to go,” I told Lyle, and went into my little room to temporarily hide. I sat at the tiny desk and stared at the blank screen of my computer. Could Lyle have been right about my mother? He usually was right about people. I tried to think back, to remember how Soleil had acted around Warren. What did people in love act like, anyway? Had she smiled when he walked into a room, just because she was happy to see him? When he was gone, even if hadn’t been very long since he’d left, had she missed him so much that it felt a little sore in her chest?
I rubbed at my breastbone as I thought. That was probably what love felt like, a lot of joy, and a lot of pain when you were separated. And if this was true, then I had been wrong about how I was conceived. Maybe Soleil hadn’t been drunk, or been tricked, or whatever else I had thought about her sleeping with her brother-in-law. Maybe she had loved Warren Wilde, so she had reached out to him with her body to try to show him. Maybe she hadn’t known what else to do so that he would see what was in her heart. I could understand that very well.
The noise of my phone in my bag woke me out of these thoughts. It was too soon to be César again, but it might have been Lyle warning me that my father was on the move in the stadium, so I grabbed it quickly.
In fact, it was Wyatt, the guy I had met at Roy’s Tavern the last time I had gone there. That had been before I had admitted to people that I was pregnant, before I had admitted a lot of things to myself. Today, instead of continuing the jokey texts I’d been answering with when he asked me out, I just wrote, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m pregnant.”
There was nothing on
