Page 4 of A Week Away
“My mom works for this lawyer. He does collections. He buys people’s debt, and then she calls them up and makes them pay. I have to pay room and board, so I work there on weekends catching up the filing and stuff. I went on my mom’s computer and ran the report. She can’t remember her passwords so she writes them down on a Post-It and puts them in her desk drawer. It wasn’t hard.”
I thought about all the information he’d gotten from the report. My address first and foremost. He knew I owned the co-op with Ronnie and that we’d taken out a small mortgage of fifty thousand—at one of the two banks in California that will write a mortgage on a co-op—to redo the kitchen and bathroom. I had tried hard for a long time to keep anyone from having my information. Now I was out there. Now people could find me. Or, rather, they could find Dom Reilly. I’d thought his name would keep me safe. I’d been wrong.
“You know that’s illegal. Running my credit report,” I said.
“Most of the things people want to do are illegal.”
“Speaking of illegal… Your mom charges you room and board at seventeen?”
“That’s not illegal. She’s teaching me responsibility. And it’s more than you ever did.”
“I’m not your father.”
“Stop saying that,” he said loudly enough that I was glad I’d pulled him into the park.
I had to tell him the truth. Or at least something like it. “I bought your father’s information from a guy in Reno. Birth certificate, baptismal and confirmation certificates. High school diploma. And a Michigan driver’s license which he kindly put my face on.” I took a breath. I didn’t really want to say this, but I had to. “I paid extra because he said your father was on the bottom of Lake Erie and wouldn’t be using his identification.”
For a brief moment he seemed to take it in, then reject it. “That’s not true. You’re lying. You’re my dad.”
“I was told he crossed someone in the Detroit mob. The Partnership.”
“That’s not true either. No one ever said anything about my dad being in the Mafia.”
“I didn’t say he was in it. I said he pissed someone off who was.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Okay. What do you remember?”
“Nothing. I was four.”
“What have people told you?”
“My mother said he just left. She came home one day and he was gone. His stuff was gone. She’s never heard from him again.”
“Stuff includes his important papers?”
“I guess.”
It was an important point. The documents I had were originals. And that meant that I very likely had the important papers Dom Reilly disappeared with. Or possibly, Dom Reilly disappeared and then someone got rid of the papers. Though that didn’t explain how they got from Detroit to Reno.
I could see that Cass was making his own calculations, struggling to keep believing I was his father. I tried to nudge that along.
“Do I look like your father?”
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“Your mother doesn’t have pictures of your dad?”
“She was mad at him for running off, so she got rid of them.”
“You’ve never seen a picture of your dad?”
“No, I have. I have other relatives. It’s just been a long time.”
He was looking closely at me. Trying to figure out if I actually looked like the pictures he’d seen somewhere a long time ago. My guess was I didn’t since he was starting to crumble.
“He’s not in Lake Erie. He can’t be.”
