Laura Caldwell - The Night I got Lucky

And then he uttered the sentence that changed everything for Jan and me. “I gave them to all my kids.”

In that instant, I felt for the first time that I loved this man. That he could think of me as one of his “kids” was a bigger gift than anything he could ever have handed me.

Now, I felt a swell of sadness staring at Jan’s plaque, thinking of what my mom had lost when he died, of how intensely she must have missed him to have made this plaque and hung it on the side of the house, like a mini headstone. I thought of what I’d lost, too, after Jan died.

I spun around then, struck, at last, with a charge of motivation. I went into the study that had been Jan’s. Photos of his extended family lined the walls. The desk was big and manly, the chair a rolling leather boat. It pleased me that the room was still here, still his. It meant that my mother hadn’t rid herself of everything old in order to embrace her new life.

I had to boot up the computer and wipe off a thin sheen of dust. My mother didn’t believe in e-mails-too impersonal, she said. She preferred to write notes on her pink personalized stationery with her name embossed in silver at the top. The only Internet access she had was through an old dial-up that took about five decades to connect. Once I was connected, I went immediately to Google.

I hesitated. I fiddled with Jan’s silver Mont Blanc pen that stood in a leather holder on the desktop. Do it, I told myself.

I put the pen down, and I typed in Brandon Tremont. My father’s name.

I’d done this years ago when the Internet contained only minimal information, and I’d found nothing except a family tree showing descendants of a particular Tremont family from Pelahatchie, Mississippi, and the mention of a man named Brandon Gunnison Tremont, born 1859. Decidedly not my father. I’d been strangely relieved at the dead end. My dad was nowhere to be found. I didn’t have to deal with what-ifs. And yet my obsession, my curiosity about him, grew intensely over the years. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when such worries and thoughts had been miraculously erased from my mind. Yet that erasure had left me flat. My obsessing had been the way I’d kept myself connected to him. He was a ghost now. I wanted to say an official goodbye to the ghost and maybe get some answers to satisfy the child in me who’d wondered for so long.

Now, I sat back from the computer feeling as if I’d been slapped. There were 26,415 results for Brandon Tremont. I did the search again, putting his name in quotations so that it would only search for those two names together and in that order. Fourteen results this time. Could he be one of them?

I clicked on the first one. My finger on the mouse felt heavy, awkward. There was a Brandon Tremont Web site, apparently for a guy who was a computer graphics consultant. Did my father have his own Web site? Was he in computers now? Anything was possible. I wouldn’t have been shocked to find out he was a circus performer. I clicked on the “biography” link of the site. And there was a picture of Brandon Tremont-a kid who looked about eighteen years old and had albino-white hair and terrible acne.

I went back to the Google site. The second and third results also concerned the acne-ridden Brandon, who had apparently been on his high school lacrosse team. The fourth and fifth were about some Brandon in Tampa, Florida-a black man, a photo revealed, so again, not my dad. I began to wonder whether this might require a private investigator. My father had hidden from my mother, from his responsibilities, for years. He might have easily changed his name.

I clicked on the sixth result. It seemed to be a misplaced link, a Web site for Cover to Cover, a bookstore in Telluride, Colorado. But then I noticed a section called “About the Owners,” which I clicked on. My fingers felt light now, as if they were moving too fast, and for some reason, I wished I could reverse the click. Irrationally, I moved the mouse to the top of the screen, ready to hit the back button.

Too late. There he was.

An older version, of course. Silver hair now, instead of heavy, rich brown, lines stretching from his eyes. He had his arm around a woman with frizzy, honey-colored hair and tortoiseshell glasses. Below the picture, the caption read, Brandon and Lillian Tremont, owners of Cover to Cover.

Without taking my eyes off the picture, I lifted the phone next to Jan’s desk and dialed United Airlines.

“I’d like to get a flight to Telluride, Colorado,” I said. “Today.”

“C an I get you something to drink before takeoff?” the flight attendant asked. They were so much nicer here in first class. This was the only seat left on the flight to Denver, and luckily I had a plethora of frequent flyer miles from business traveling. “Maybe a water or an orange juice?” she said.

“Chardonnay, please.” It was only 3:45 in the afternoon, technically not happy hour, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if it were 7:30 a.m.

“Certainly,” said the flight attendant, who was clearly familiar with daytime drinkers.

The Chardonnay came in a thimble disguised as a wineglass. I downed it in about three seconds while other passengers filed by, heading back to the coach section, where I usually sat.

“Another?” the attendant said.

“Please.” I fought back the urge to beg for the bottle. This was all happening at lightning speed. And nothing, save my quick-moving relationship with Chris, had ever happened fast in my life. I was a planner, a watcher and, as I’d recently told Odette, a procrastinator. Not even twenty-four hours before, I’d been in Odette’s basement office debating what to do with my life. Since then, I’d admitted near infidelity to my husband, moved out of the house, tracked down my father and gotten on a plane to find him.

The second glass of wine came, filled to the brim this time. I gave the attendant a grateful smile, which hopefully said, Keep ’em coming, because the fact was I’d only tracked down my father on the Internet. I hadn’t called him. I hadn’t even called Cover to Cover to find out if it was still open, let alone if he was still the owner or if he was even in town.

I saw my father as a skittish, delicate animal that could frighten easily. You had to sneak up on such an animal. This was a complete departure from the way I used to think of him when I was a child. He was a tall, strong man in a house of women. He was the person who lifted you up and threw you in the air until you screamed with laughter and my mother said, “Brandon,” in a disapproving but laughing voice. He was the man who spoke two other languages-foreign, awkward-sounding words. He was the head of our family, the sun we all moved around. But he’d taken off, and my feelings about him had gone through wide, fluctuating metamorphoses-from pining for him, to hating him and denying his existence, to obsessing that somehow it was me, the last child, who had scared him out into the world alone.

He wasn’t alone now, though. At least according to the Web site, he was married to Lillian of the frizzy hair. This made me oddly jealous and irritated. And his owning of a bookstore was perplexing. He’d never seemed the bookish type. But what did I know about him? Absolutely nothing.

I had a few more thimbles of wine once we were airborne, then managed to sleep for an hour or so. In the Denver airport during my layover, I went to the bathroom to wash the plane grime from my face. I had only a small bag with me, the one I’d brought to my mom’s and then grabbed again after I’d hastily written her a note letting her know I’d call soon. As I went through the bag now, I realized I’d forgotten to pack my cleanser. I also didn’t have my moisturizer, my blue hairbrush (the only one that could mildly control my waves), a change of socks, the cute Italian driving shoes I’d just bought or any decent shirts. I sank onto the tiled floor, fighting back the panicky feeling of being adrift and unprepared. An older woman walked into the bathroom and glared at the sight of me on the floor. I scrambled to my feet, staring enviously at her huge wheeled bag that probably contained everything she needed to survive for three years.