I remember the first time I realized that my son was a stronger person than I’d ever been. He was in half-day kindergarten. I’d mistimed the baking of a batch of mini quiches for a client’s cocktail party and couldn’t leave. Mom was cleaning a house. As I had way too many times, I asked Dad if he could pick Spencer up from school. His legs were killing him by then, and he moved so slow. He showed up probably seven minutes after I would have.
When the two of them returned, Spencer tossed his backpack on the kitchen table, declared that he was ready for “taste-testing duty,” and then rated my latest creations “five-star nosh.” He disappeared to our room—the one we still shared at my parents’ house, the one I’d grown up in—as if everything were normal.
Dad broke the news. When he pulled up in front of the school, he saw Spencer on the ground, two boys standing over him. He managed to get out of his car in time to hear the gist of the boys’ comments. Why did he have the same last name as the one his mom grew up with? Why didn’t he have a dad? Everyone knows your mom ran away and came back with a bastard baby.
The boys took off when they saw my father headed their way. “I thought you should know,” Dad told me. “I still think we made the right decision, but it’s always up to you. Oh, and for what it’s worth, I recognized the biggest kid as Tony Faulkner’s boy. I’m half tempted to drive to that hellhole of a house and have a word with him.”
“That’s a bad idea, Dad.”
Dad shook his head, but said nothing else. The hellhole in question was a multi-acre lot off Three Mile Harbor where multiple generations of Faulkners resided. The Faulkner family was despised throughout the East End, but the topic of their family was especially touchy in our house. Mom and Dad still believe that my entire life might have been different if it hadn’t been for my association with “that girl,” as they referred to Trisha.
Tony Faulkner was Trisha’s youngest uncle, which would make the kid bullying Spencer her cousin. Based on what I knew about the things Faulkner men did to children, it did not surprise me at all that his son would already be screwed up.
When I asked Spencer about it that night, he shrugged and insisted it was no big deal.
“If you want to tell other kids where you were born, and why your last name is Mullen, you can.”
Against my mother’s wishes, I told Spencer the truth about the circumstances of his birth the first time he asked me, on his fifth birthday. I also told him that my parents had made the decision for me at the time not to share the details with anyone. All they said to those brave enough to ask was that I was back home, and they were overjoyed to have their baby grandson, Spencer, at the house, too. Filling in the blanks, most people assumed I had run away, gotten pregnant, and then come home again. It was a way to protect my privacy—to let me start over without people asking me about “what happened” for the rest of my life—but none of us had stopped to think how it would eventually affect Spencer. At the time, I was the child who needed protecting. Spencer was just an extension of me.
“They only went after me because of Luis,” Spencer said.
“Who’s Luis?”
“He’s a Mexican kid in our class. They were telling him that his parents work for free and that they’re taking jobs from all the people who were born here and that they don’t speak English right and stuff. So when I was captain of the kickball team, I picked Luis first and refused to pick any of them. It matters a lot when you get picked.”
My six-year-old son, after everything he had been through, had stuck up for another kid.
“Besides,” he added, “it’s not their beeswax.” He sounded exactly like my mother.
“True, but it’s yours. I didn’t want you to think that you have to keep a secret or tell a lie. All I ask is that if you tell anyone, make sure that I know too, okay?”
I’d been home for five years by then, and in that time I had told only one person where I’d been those years, and that was Susanna. If Spencer’s decisions were going to change that, I needed to be prepared.
“It’s not a secret or a lie,” Spencer said. “It’s not anything, because I don’t remember not living here. And I don’t care where the other half of me came from. I’m a Mullen. I’m from you. And Grandma and Granddaddy.” He added with a smile, “And I was about to kick those kids’ asses before Granddaddy saved them.”
Seven years later, as he carried a plate of eggs and the jar of salsa to the table, Spencer looked over my shoulder and caught me reading a website called Rate My Professors on my iPad, where there’s a chili pepper next to my husband’s name, indicating “hotness.”
Spencer had to know why I was looking. It was now day two, and the Post had a follow-up story. With nothing new to report, they ran a “Who is Jason Powell?” piece, complete with quotes from online student reviews. “Distractingly smoking.” “Seems like he might be gettable.” “Sexy AF. I’d let him teach me anything he wants!”
We’ve all read this book and seen this movie before: a potentially great man struck down by the lingering shadows of a scandal. Would-be presidents tarnished by extramarital affairs. Celebrities unable to find work after tape recordings emerge of their most hateful comments. Businesses boycotted for being on the wrong side of the cultural tide.
I imagined Jason floating beside the other castaways. I pictured unsold copies of his book being returned to the warehouse, the loss of clients at his consulting company, and the university trying to strip him of tenure. What would happen to Spencer and me? What would everyone say about us?
But if Spencer was worried, he wasn’t letting on. “Dad’s innocent,” he said. “Everyone else will realize that soon enough. And then everything will go back to normal.” There was not a shade of doubt in his voice.
I squeezed his hand and said “I know,” then waited until he left for school to continue reading.
I was alone when I heard a knock at the door an hour later.
I looked through the peephole to see my mother glaring at our hideous brass knocker, the one I called the Vomiting Gargoyle, the one I’d meant to replace since we first closed on the house three years earlier. It took me a second to process that she was actually there, standing on my stoop. Ginny Mullen does not show up on doorsteps in Greenwich Village.
I could count on one hand the number of times she had visited me in the city. Though they weren’t officially related to any of the original Bonacker families of the seventeenth century, she and my father were born and bred Islanders, with at least four generations settled in the Springs on both sides. But where their great-grandfathers were able to work with pride as fishermen and farmers, my parents worked service jobs (handyman for Dad, housework for Mom) for wealthy summer vacationers in the hopes of squirreling away enough money to make it through the rest of the year. My mother associated the city with the people who treated her as something less than human. She famously declined the opportunity to accompany my sixth-grade class to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, explaining that all of New York City smelled of sweat, urine, garbage, and dirty money. When I told her I was marrying Jason, she told me, in this order, that she was happy for me, that Jason was a good man, and that “you better not let my grandson turn into a little asshole.”
As I untumbled all the locks, I had no doubt that her sudden appearance in the city was directly connected to the unreturned messages she had left on my phone since Jason became viral fodder the previous morning.
“Hey Mom,” I said as I swung the door open. “What are you doing here? Did you take the train?”
She was in the foyer before I finished my questions. “No, I had Jeeves the butler hire a goddamned limousine.”
“Why did you come all the way into the city?”
“Oh, please, Angela, you’re not the center of the universe. I have an appointment. A specialist. Figured I should at least stop by and see my daughter while they’re ripping off my Obamacare.”
For a second, I wasn’t sure what to believe. Was she lying about the doctor’s appointment to check on me, or had she been calling about a health problem, only to have her only child ignore her calls?