“We’re all scared of him,” Mike explained. “Maybe you could bring Lyle with you, because I think they’re friends.”
“I don’t need Lyle, because I’m not scared of anyone,” I announced. “I’ll take on any man, anytime, anywhere, and I’ll crush his balls.”
That had come out pretty vehemently, and they stared at me. “Great,” Brenda said, and I turned around and headed out to the parking lot again. It gave me more time to cry in my car.
The big, orange building only made me think of César, especially because I could hear the offense in a meeting room as the would-be Woodsmen cheerleaders worked out on the field. I managed to talk to their coach about the team’s “image realignment” for quite a while, and the guy actually wasn’t so bad. It was more that he was worried about his job after all the recent upheaval in the Woodsmen organization, so I had to make sure he knew that I wasn’t there to fire him or anything evil like that.
“I’m not interested in what some lady from the front office has to say about these dancers,” Sam started out telling me when I introduced myself, “so you can take your opinions and put them—”
“Don’t start with me. I’m not in the mood today,” I told him sharply, but then damn it if I didn’t start to cry.
His face got very sympathetic. “My wife got used to cry a lot when she was pregnant with our daughter. It was hormonal, but also maybe because at the time, I had a different common-law wife. Also, no one knew she was knocked-up, they just thought she was fat.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” I asked, but it had broken the ice between us. As Sam made the prospective cheerleaders run laps around the field, he and I discussed the direction he was going to take the squad, uniform choices, and how his own daughter had colic and cried for the first nine or so months of her life. That information I could have done without. I ended up staying for most of the morning to watch the try-outs and work from there, making calls and coordinating from my phone, and also trading insults with Sam. It was fun and lifted my spirits a lot. I ignored the messages and calls from César, not looking or listening to the voicemails that piled up in the inbox. And I only cried a few times, but a bunch of the women trying out did, too, so I fit right in.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam told me as I left the building. “Come back tomorrow and I’ll bring our old playpen for you to borrow.”
“Thanks, and nice to meet you too.”
“Happy to deal with you any day,” he said. “You don’t know squat about dancing, but I like your attitude and I don’t want anyone else from the front office telling me what to do.”
“You’ll definitely be dealing with me, because no one else from the front office wants to talk to you either,” I answered, and he thought that was hilarious.
I walked into the parking lot and my phone buzzed again with César’s name. I didn’t have the heart to block him, but seeing it on the screen hurt every time. I stopped and looked at it, wondering if I should talk to him. The more I thought about the files on his computer (and I had thought about them a lot), the more I understood his position when we had first met. He hadn’t known me, except for one drunken night and then when I had climbed his gate to announce that I was pregnant. And I had written some pretty awful-sounding things on that questionnaire without thinking about how it would read, like how my favorite foods were gin and sushi, that I thought work was optional, that a perfect night out ended two days later.
César hadn’t known that there was more to me than that, just like I hadn’t known that he was more than a fun, hot football player who bought pricey tequila and then snuck out the morning after. I decided to call him back so we could figure this out together. I didn’t want to fight—
“Camdyn. I’m glad I ran into you here.”
I looked up at Warren Wilde, just a few feet from me on the sidewalk in front of the building. “No, fuck you,” I told him. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Wait, please,” he said, and I did pause. “I know this is the day that Soleil died last year and I was worried about you,” he had the nerve to tell me.
“Are you kidding me? Please, like you ever cared about my mother.”
“I did care about Soleil, in my way,” he said gravely.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I cared about her as your mother. And I love you,” Warren Wilde answered.
I was so angry, I felt dizzy. “You don’t love me. Or do you mean, you care about me, in your way, as your niece? That’s truly heartfelt, Warren.”
“You don’t understand. My wife—your Aunt Stellina was not in a place…” He stopped. “I could not have acknowledged you as my daughter. I couldn’t have done that to Stellina.”
“Let me translate that again for you. What you meant to say was that you didn’t want to be embarrassed publicly as the gigantic bastard who slept with his sister-in-law, so you ignored our real relationship to each other and went about your day for more than twenty years,” I announced loudly. I yelled it, pretty much.
“That’s not accurate,” he said, and I could tell I had pushed his buttons, just like I had always known how to do.
“Yes, it is. You’re a sleezy, disgusting excuse for a man—” The ground seemed to roll under my feet.
“I’m also your father,” Warren cut me off. “And apparently, I’m going to be a grandfather.”
I put my hands over my stomach. “You’re not going to have anything to
