Amber Read online

  He shakes his head. “No. In New York, where they live.”

  “Is it in the city?” Em asks.

  “Yes, of course. I said in New York.” He frowns at her like she’s stupid.

  “You are aware that there’s an entire state named New York, right?” Rose asks.

  I’m happy to see that she’s on the same page as I am—the one that reads: this guy is a total assweed who needs to take his sorry butt out of our house.

  “They live in Manhattan. They have a recording studio there, and they like to be near it in the event inspiration strikes.”

  His explanation does not compute. “A recording studio?” I ask. “Why would they have a recording studio?”

  Lister stares at me. After a few seconds, he blinks twice. “Are you being deliberately obtuse?”

  Carol clears her throat. “Mr. Lester . . .”

  “It’s Lister,” he says, glaring at her. He probably thinks she said his name incorrectly on purpose, but Carol has never been good with details.

  “Sure, whatever you say. The thing is . . . we’ve kept the identities of the girls’ fathers and the circumstances surrounding their conceptions to ourselves, so they’re not aware of the . . . er . . . situation.” She has the grace to look uncomfortable. That, more than anything else, has me worried, because Carol is usually too tough to suffer that emotion.

  I exchange glances with my sisters. Seeing that they’re both as shocked as I am at this revelation emboldens me enough to speak up for all three of us. “What exactly is going on here, Moms?” I look at the three older women who raised us as one big, happy family.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Sally says, her gaze going to the ceiling. “I knew this was going to be tough.”

  “Mr. Lister, could you please excuse us for a moment?” Barbara asks. “We’d like to talk to our girls alone, if you don’t mind.”

  He stands. “Like I said, I bill by the hour. I’ll be out on the veranda.”

  “I hope you don’t think you’re billing us by the hour,” I say. I don’t like his haughty attitude one single bit. No wonder he drives that car.

  “No, of course not. But every minute you take to consider this offer costs my clients more money. Clearly, they’re already prepared to pay out quite a bit, but I don’t see the need to add to that financial burden unnecessarily, do you?”

  I shrug, not sure what my answer is. Maybe they should pay more than necessary. They did, after all, either completely abandon all of us or otherwise made it perfectly clear they weren’t interested in being a family, for almost twenty-five years. Maybe he considers that a ‘burden,’ but I’m more inclined to consider it a travesty of biblical proportions. Yeah . . . Lister can wait until we’re good and ready. I raise an eyebrow at him, silently daring him to say one more thing about it.

  He leaves without another word, and I wait until the door shuts behind him before I turn to my mother. “Barbara . . . what the hell?”

  “Watch the tone,” she says, frowning. She looks first at Sally and then at Carol. “So, sisters of my heart . . . who’s going to tell them the Big Secret?”

  “I’ll do it,” Barbara says, sighing. “It was my idea in the first place.” It’s the saddest I’ve ever seen her look.

  “No, you’re not going to take the hit for something we all agreed to a hundred percent,” Carol says, her face lined and shadowed; it’s as if she’s aged ten years in the last ten minutes. She checks with Sally, who’s nodding in agreement.

  “Tell them, Barb,” Sally says. “But no fair playing the martyr. We’re all in this together, equal partners. That’s what we agreed on before, and nothing’s changed.”

  I sit back down, waiting in stunned silence to hear my mother explain how it is that three women who never let us get away with a single falsehood, who warned us from day one about how we cannot trust people outside our walls, and who lived faithfully by the credos of honesty and loyalty . . . have been lying to us about who we are and where we’re from for over twenty years.

  “Sally, Carol, and I met in Las Vegas,” Barbara says, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her peasant blouse.

  “Wait . . . ,” Rose says. “I thought you said before that you met in Alabama.”

  Rose’s mother, Sally, holds up her hand. “Can we just let Barb tell the story first?”

  “You mean, save all our questions ’til the end?” Rose asks. The bitterness in her voice makes me feel better. I’m glad I’m not the only one angry about what’s going on here. I can’t tell if Em is mad. She looks more lost than anything.

  Sally nods at my mother, silently telling her to continue.

  “We met in Las Vegas, backstage at a Red Hot show,” Barbara says.

  I frown. “Red Hot?”

  “The band Red Hot.” A smile appears on my mother’s lips. “It was totally hot.”

  “Red hot,” Carol says and giggles. She actually giggles! Carol never does that. And then her face crumples and tears well up in her eyes.

  Em frowns at me while she gestures at her mother’s crazy, out-of-character reactions to the story being told by my mother. We’re all riding an emotional roller coaster today, apparently.

  I slump down in my chair. Red Hot is a band whose members still to this day tease their long, mulleted hair and wear makeup to complement their tight leather pants and torn T-shirts. They’re old enough to have saggy pancake butts and moobs now, but does that stop them? No. I obviously have no idea who these women are. Aliens must have come in the night and kidnapped my mothers and replaced them with these fangirls.

  “We dropped everything and started following them all over the country,” Barbara says. “Jobs, school, everything went by the wayside . . . We didn’t care about anything but the music and the men who played it.”

  “We traveled the world. Don’t forget London and Paris,” Carol adds.

  “Ah, Paris . . .” Sally sighs, looking off in the distance.

  “Excuse me, but what?” I look in frustration at these middle-aged women who appear to be lost in the memories.

  “What, what?” Barbara asks, coming back to earth. She sounds cranky.

  “Are you telling us you were actual groupies?”

  “Yep,” Carol says. “That’s about right.”

  I look at my sisters. “Are you guys buying this?”

  Em shrugs, looking deflated. “Maybe. They are pretty open-minded about a lot of things. Spontaneous. I can see them dropping everything to follow their dreams.”

  “And they know every single lyric to every one of their songs,” Rose reminds us.

  She has a point. It’s true; Red Hot music has been playing in the background of our lives for as long as I can remember. I hate right now that I know all of their lyrics too.

  “We stayed with them for two intense years,” Barbara explains, twisting one of her long dark locks around her finger.

  “It was glorious,” Sally says, smiling, her cornflower-blue eyes bright with tears. “I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.”

  I want to comment on the fact that she’s so scatterbrained, she probably can’t remember what she had for breakfast this morning, so the significance of her pronouncement is pretty damn suspect, but I don’t. Sally isn’t a bad person, even if she did hide from us who we are and where we came from.

  “But then things got messy,” Carol says, sighing. She looks deliberately at each of us. Comprehension sinks in.

  “In other words, you got pregnant,” I say. I’m so disappointed. Our mothers have never called our births messy before. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting.

  “Not messy, that’s not the right word,” Sally says, her blissful expression slipping a bit. “Things got complicated.”

  “Very complicated,” Barbara says. Her tone tells me she’s remembering something that’s pissing her off. “We were told in no uncertain terms that pregnant women and kids were not welcome on the tour.”

  “By whom?” Rose asks. “Our fathers?” She loo
ks at Em and me and then at our mothers.

  “Not exactly,” Sally says. Gone is the faraway look, and in its place is sadness.

  “It was the band’s manager, Ted,” Carol explains.

  “And Darrell,” Barbara adds. “Don’t forget Darrell.”

  “How could we forget him?” Sally asks. She wipes her tears away and looks off in the distance again.

  “Yes,” Carol says. “Darrell was one of the original members of the band, the bassist who was replaced later, but he was very convincing at the time when he explained how much it would hurt the band if we stayed.”

  “He was. And we agreed. It’s not that anyone twisted our arms,” Sally says, looking to the other women for confirmation.

  “No, not at all. We took a long, hard look at what we’d been doing and what we wanted for our children going forward, and the life we were leading didn’t mesh,” Barbara says.

  “A clean break was what we needed. From the environment, from the band . . . from everything.” Carol nods once, still very convinced, apparently, that they did the right thing. Her chin only trembles slightly.

  I can’t believe that all it took was two people to convince our moms to take off from this great life they were having and disappear forever. I feel sick over it and have to pause for a few seconds before I can regroup. I look toward the front door, jerking my thumb in the direction of Lister. “Was he involved?”

  Sally waves her hand around. “No, no, no, he would have been ten years old at the time. We dealt with Ted and Darrell . . . that’s it.”

  “What about the rest of the band?” Rose asks.

  Our three moms look at each other, all of them shrugging simultaneously. Carol speaks for the group. “We decided it was best for everyone involved if we made a clean break.”

  “So you just left?” Em asks. She looks like she’s going to cry.

  “Yes . . . with a little nest egg that their manager gave us from the band, and we set up our lives here.” Barbara shrugs as if that’s the end of the story.

  My blood pressure rises to new highs. I feel like the vein in my neck is going to explode. “And they’ve known where you are . . . where we are . . . this entire time, but they never bothered to come see you? Or us?” I’m clarifying because I need to know how hard I’m going to have to hate these men for the rest of my life . . . men I’ve dreamed about finding since I was old enough to understand what a father is.

  “No.” Carol shakes her head emphatically. “We agreed it would be a complete break not just from them but from the life. We didn’t tell them or anyone else where we were going, and we left without any notice and without saying goodbye. They didn’t know we were pregnant, and I doubt Darrell told them.”

  Clearly, my moms are not the people I thought they were. How could women who’ve been nothing but warm and generous my entire life ever have been so coldhearted? I don’t get it. There has to be more to the story. It has something to do with these men, I know it does.

  “Why wouldn’t he tell them?” Em asks. “Didn’t he care about you? Us? Or them, at least?”

  “He was only concerned about the music. He felt that women and children would interfere in the life, and we didn’t disagree.” Carol shrugs as if she isn’t talking like a callous monster I’ve never met before.

  “But . . . without even saying goodbye?” Em asks, sounding as disillusioned as I feel. No one answers her. All of our mothers are just looking at one another, unspoken thoughts floating in the air between them.

  “The life?” Rose asks. “You act as if that’s a thing . . . The Life.”

  “Oh, you know . . . ,” Sally says, sounding embarrassed. “The Life—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was no place for pregnant girls or babies, and we knew that. Darrell and Ted did us a favor by being honest about it and giving us the means to leave. We thought about telling the whole band what was going on and trying to do the long-distance thing, but we all agreed it was a bad idea.” Sally looks to her two partners in crime and they nod.

  Barbara jumps in, scowling as she explains. “The press was terrible, always hounding the band, making them miserable. The guys were under tremendous pressure, and it was affecting their ability to write more music. We couldn’t imagine getting in the way of that or subjecting our children to the pressures of a public life. We knew if we stayed with them in any capacity—even long-distance—it would happen; our children would be hounded and harassed and forced to live in the public eye, held under a terribly critical microscope.”

  “Which was unacceptable,” Carol says. “Ted and Darrell agreed wholeheartedly; a clean break was the best way to handle the situation, and the only way to make that happen was to leave without saying anything to anyone.”

  “They offered us enough money to start a new life and we took it.” Sally looks away as she brushes another tear off her cheek.

  I have never seen her cry like this. Hell, I’ve never seen any of my three mothers this emotional about anything. And now, I think I know why; they left a part of their hearts behind when they left the band. So many emotions rise up inside me and battle to take over; I’m angry, sad, and disappointed, but most of all, I’m frustrated. I’m too stunned to say anything. All I can do is stare at these women I thought I knew.

  “There are five men in the band,” Rose says, ever the practical one. “Which one is my father?”

  The three older women look at each other with sheepish grins and shrug in unison.

  “You mean you don’t know?” I ask, shocked that they’d be this irresponsible. These are not the women I’ve known my whole life. “I can’t believe this. Which one is mine?”

  They shrug again.

  “Holy shit.” I shake my head at them. How careless can a woman be? Who are these people?

  “And me?” Em asks, so quietly I almost don’t hear it.

  “No,” Barbara says. “We don’t know. What can we say? We dealt in a lot of free love at the time. We partied, we did drugs, we had sex. With all of them.” She glares at us, daring us to cast judgment.

  Judging another person or her actions is a big no-no in our house. Our mothers have always taught us to be accepting of people and their life decisions. I guess now I know why they’ve groomed us to be this way. Talk about self-serving. Still, I can’t fault them for trying to help us be better people. Regardless of my mothers’ shared past, the fact remains: judging isn’t cool.

  I let out a long, heavy sigh, feeling exhausted over how thoroughly my world has been turned upside down. My chest is aching and my head hurts too, but I’m pretty sure I’m only experiencing the very beginning of the pain and confusion. All these years, my sisters and I have speculated about our fathers, assuming our mothers were telling the truth when they said they didn’t know who these men were. But we were duped. Our mothers could have answered all of our questions, but they just let us wonder . . . they forced us to believe the lie that they didn’t know who our fathers were. I’m trying really hard not to be angry at them for this, but it’s not working.

  Rose, Em, and I fantasized, imagined, and dreamed about what our lives would have been like with fathers in them . . . only to find out now that it was a conscious choice our mothers made to ensure we’d never know. I’m disappointed not only in them but also in the men involved. How could our fathers have been so clueless? Why didn’t they try to track our mothers down after they left? They did it just recently, as evidenced by their lawyer waiting on our porch, but why did they wait until we were almost twenty-five? I’m guessing they wanted nothing to do with raising little girls, too enamored of The Life, as my mothers call it, to be bothered.

  Rose stands, her face a mask of disgust. “I can’t deal with this right now. And I’m not interested in anything that lawyer came here for. I have a very sick cat down at the clinic, and I need to grab a quick lunch before I go back.” She leaves the dining room for the kitchen.

  “Me neither,” Em says, practically running out of the room. She looks like s
he’s about to start bawling at any second.

  I stand and walk over to the front door, yanking it open to find Lister standing out there staring off into the distance. “You can come back in. We know the Big Secret now.” I know I sound bitter, but I don’t care. Anyone would in my shoes.

  He searches my face, looking for clues about how our conversation went, maybe. I don’t feel the need to help him understand my reaction to this disturbing news, though. I wait for him to respond.

  “Are you ready to come back to New York with me?” he asks.

  I bark out a laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

  He looks bewildered. “It’s ten million dollars. Each.”

  I shrug. “I don’t need ten million dollars and neither do my sisters.”

  “But . . .” All he can do is sputter at that point.

  I gesture in the direction of the dining room, where my mothers are grouped together having a private meeting. “The papers are on the table. Feel free to pack ’em up and take ’em out of here.”

  I start to walk away, but he grabs my arm to stop me. I look down, praying he’ll keep his fingers there for another five seconds so I’ll have an excuse to slap him silly, but he lets go.

  “You should come and meet them.” He looks decidedly uncomfortable, unable to meet my eyes.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “So you can tell them. Yourself.”

  “Tell them what? That I’m not for sale?”

  He shrugs and then looks me in the eye. “If that’s how you see their gesture, as some sort of purchase of affection.”

  “Isn’t that what you’d call it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I’d call it.”

  I fold my arms over my chest, hating that I feel so vulnerable. “What do you call it? I want to know.”

  He sighs and looks at the ground. “I call it . . . regret.”

  Regret, my ass. It’s guilt, and I’m not in a forgiving mood. I shake my head. “I’m not going, and neither are my sisters.”

  “If you change your mind, just give me a call. I’ll leave my card.”

  “Yeah. Right. You’ll be the first to know if and when hell freezes over and I decide to visit those men in Manhattan.”