Page 102 of This Time Around
“What?”
She rolled her face toward him, but didn’t open her eyes. “Was that your phone buzzing?”
It dawned on Jack that maybe that’s what had woken him up. He spotted the device on the nightstand and stretched over Allie to grab it. His thoughts reeled with worst-case scenarios. Maybe Paige had gotten hurt at the sleepover, or his mom had fallen or?—
His brain skidded to a halt as he read the words on the screen. He stared at them for a few moments, opening and closing his eyes a few times to clear his vision. Without a word, he set the phone facedown on the nightstand and lay back down beside Allie. He pulled her against him so they were face to face in the darkness, then stroked a hand over her hip.
“I just missed a call from my father.”
He spoke the words quietly, almost as though he hadn’t committed to saying them aloud. They dropped like bricks onto the bed between them, cold and unfamiliar in the dim glow of the clock radio.
He watched Allie’s eyes flutter open, and she stared at him for a few beats, studying his face. Jack kept stroking the side of her body, soothing himself with the feel of her skin.
“Your father?” Allie murmured. “I didn’t realize you were in contact with him.”
“I’m not,” Jack said. “I spoke to him once sixteen years ago. Then again ten years ago.”
Her brow furrowed as the timeline seemed to register. She reached up and brushed the hair off his forehead, but she didn’t ask anything. Didn’t push for details about the call just now or the ones in the past. Something about that made him feel safe. Trusted. Loved.
So Jack found himself spilling the details. “You know he left when I was six and I didn’t talk to him after that.”
“Right,” Allie murmured, still touching the side of his face. “I don’t remember him calling a single time when we were together. Not on your birthdays or when you graduated from high school or when we got engaged.”
Jack took a deep breath. “I called him about two weeks after you and I split up. I was floundering and not sure what to do. I thought maybe he’d have some sort of fatherly advice to offer.”
“Did he?”
Jack snorted. “Not especially. Told me to pull my head out of my ass, which was probably sound advice in retrospect.”
“But not what you needed to hear right then.”
“Exactly.” Jack breathed in and out in the silence, taking himself back to the next time he’d called. It was five years later, and he’d been in a much different place.
“I called again to invite him to my wedding,” he said. “Caroline was pregnant, and I was excited about that. Excited about graduating from college. I just felt like life was coming together for me. I was the first college grad in the family and I was going to be a father. I guess I wanted my own father to know that.”
“That makes sense.” She drew her hand down over his shoulder, her movements slow like she was soothing a cat. Jack’s hand rested on her hip, and there was something so intimate about talking this way in the darkness, about touching each other with such familiarity. “So how did that conversation go?” she asked.
Jack breathed in and out again, savoring Allie’s palm gliding over his shoulder. “It took him a second to even recognize my voice,” he said. “Then before I could even tell him anything, he said, ‘Let me guess—you either knocked someone up, you need money, or both.”
“Jesus,” she breathed. “What did you say?”
Jack shook his head, feeling the sting of those words all over again. “I hung up. I never told him anything. Not about the wedding or the graduation or about Paige.”
“You mean he doesn’t know he’s a grandfather?”
He shrugged as Allie skimmed the back of her hand over the side of his face. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I never told him, anyway.” He swallowed hard and stopped stroking her hip. He let his hand rest there, palm cupping the smooth roundness. “The thing is, he wasn’t totally wrong. I had knocked someone up. And deep down, I was kind of hoping he’d offer to loan me money. Maybe for a down payment or to help with the wedding or something.”
“That’s not so far-fetched,” Allie said. “After a decade of not paying child support, it’s the least he could have done for you.”
He sighed. “Even so, I guess he was right about me after all.”
“Jack, no.” Her hand drifted up to his jaw again, and he leaned into her touch the same way he found himself leaning into her words. “Look at everything you’ve done for yourself, without the tiniest bit of help from him. You have a good education, an amazing career, an awesome kid. And that last one is all you. You managed to become a great dad without any dad of your own as a role model.”
He closed his eyes, letting her words and her touch calm him. He suddenly felt more tired than he’d been in weeks, maybe months. He felt himself starting to drift off to sleep.
Allie’s voice pulled him back. “Did he leave a voicemail?”
Jack opened his eyes, disoriented again. He reached over and picked up the phone again, then squinted at the screen. “Yep,” he said. “One new voicemail.”
