Page 100 of Sweeper
My mom’s hands begin to shake as she pours the cream into her coffee. She rubs her lips together and glances up from what she’s doing. “What?”
I exhale heavily. “I need to know every detail of the conversation you had with Santino Rossi when I signed with Bethnal Green.”
“H-H-How do you know about that conversation?” she asks, her voice ragged.
My eyes sting when I croak out the next two words. “Mom, please.”
Tears begin to fill her eyes, and her head jerks back and forth. “I didn’t want you to come here.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too far away from home.”
“Mom.” I pin her with a serious look. “Cut the shit for once in my life, please.”
She scoffs at my choice of words. “Well, it seems like you already know, so why don’t you tell me?”
I rub my lips together and silently calm my nerves. “I need to hear it from you.”
“This was what I was afraid would happen,” she sputters, errant tears spilling down her cheeks. “I knew you would come here, and somehow, you’d figure it out. I didn’t know how. I just knew if you were here, next to him…the truth would come out.”
“The truth being?” I tee my mother up, once again.
She turns her head to the side, her lips twitching as she struggles to find the words.
“Mom, why is this so hard for you to say?”
“Because I never wanted you to know that Jerry wasn’t your real father.”
And there it is.
The truth…at last.
It hurts a million times more than I ever thought it would.
My eyes sting with unshed tears. “Why didn’t you want me to know?”
“Because Jerry was your father from the moment you were born. He was your father even before you were born. He came with me to my ultrasound appointments. He put together your baby crib. He hung wallpaper in the nursery for me. He was everything a father should be.”
I swallow the painful knot in my throat as I ask, “Who is my real father?”
She inhales through her nose and answers, “Vaughn Harris.”
I close my eyes as I let those two words that have rolled over and over in my mind for the better part of a year wash through me. I’ve spent the past two months in London telling myself it couldn’t be him. I watched him with his kids and grandkids and said, if he was my father, I would know it. I would feel it. He would feel it. We’d have an instinctual connection that defies logic.
I researched him and his kids online for nearly a year, feeling like it was way too fucking obvious that a family that plays professional soccer is my actual family. There’s no damn way. And for me to be recruited to his club of all the clubs in the world? Life can’t be that funny. Life can’t be that on the nose.
Yet here I sit, faced with the truth I’ve been denying for months now.
My voice is thick when I ask, “Is it true you tried to sabotage my contract with Bethnal Green?”
My mother’s chin wobbles. “Yes, but only because I was trying to honor your father’s wishes. We never planned on telling you.”
“Why not? Did you think I couldn’t handle it? Did you think I’d love Dad less?”
“I suppose so.” She leans forward and pins me with wide, watery eyes. “Vaughn Harris was a professional footballer. He was the type of father that kids without fathers dreamed of having. Jerry was a simple man. Wonderful and sweet, but he always feared that someday he would disappoint you and you’d seek out your birth father if you knew the truth. It would have crushed him, Zander.”
That thought has my hands turning into fists on the table. “I would have never done that.”
