“That’s right,” Carol Swain said. “How did you know that?”
“I got hints that someone had been asking around about me. I wondered if it was some kind of credit history check. But then it stopped, and I didn’t think about it again. Until the last few weeks, when my ex-wife reminded me about it. But even then, I kind of let it go. It didn’t seem to have any bearing on what’s going on now.”
“It doesn’t really,” she said.
“Why did you hire a detective?”
“I wanted to know who Patty’s real father was. A few years after we got married, Ronald and I decided to have a child. Turns out his little swimmers weren’t up to the job. At first we thought it must be me.” She laughed. “Ronald always felt anything that didn’t go right around here was my fault, and not being able to get pregnant was just added to the list. So I went to the doctor and it turned out that everything was just fine, so then Ronald finally agreed to go, and then we found out just whose fault it was.”
“Go on.”
“So finally I ended up going to the Mansfield Clinic. They said I could be artificially inseminated, and I thought, hey, that could work, but it took Ronald a long time to come around to the idea, no pun intended.”
“Not being the real father, that didn’t sit well.”
Carol thought about that. “He just wasn’t sure he could come to love a child that wasn’t really his. Even if it was half mine. But we talked about it, and he finally said he was okay with it, that even if he wasn’t, technically speaking, the father, he’d be a father to our child. So I had it done, chose you from the samples they had in the freezer, and then guess what happened?”
“He never really felt she was his daughter.”
“Yeah. We had this beautiful baby girl named Patricia, and he tried, but he just didn’t have it in him. You know he nearly killed her?”
“Left her in a locked car in the heat,” I said.
“Patty told you that story?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s true. Stupid bastard. Claimed he just forgot, and I have to give him the benefit of the doubt, I suppose, but honestly, you had to wonder. The marriage was already on the skids by that point, but that was it for me. I wanted him gone, and he was happy to oblige.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” she said and waved her hand. “I was better off without him. We were both making pretty good money in those days. He was at Sikorsky, I was assistant manager of a company that made plastic molds. Even after we split, I managed to look after me and Patty, and Ronald sent along the odd check, but his heart wasn’t in it, supporting a kid he had no real connection to. I kept wishing I had a decent man in my life, someone who could be a real father to Patty, because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it takes a mother and a father to raise a child, but it also has to be a mother and a father who give a shit, you know what I’m saying.”
“I know what you’re saying,” I said.
“So I started wondering, who is Patty’s real father? What kind of man is he? Is he a good man? Would he make a good father to Patty? Wouldn’t he want to see his daughter, and once he did, wouldn’t he fall in love with her and want to look after her?” She reached across the coffee table and touched my hand. “Didn’t you ever wonder? Didn’t you ever stop and think, is there a kid out there who’s mine and I don’t even know what he or she looks like? Didn’t you ever wonder, when you went to the supermarket and there was some kid stocking shelves, could that be my son? Could that kid taking my order at Burger King be carrying my DNA? Didn’t you?”
I took a moment to find my voice. “Yes,” I said. “Occasionally.”
“Didn’t you want to know?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “But learning something like that… I don’t know how to put it… would come with some obligations. I mean, once you knew, you’d feel you should reach out, something.”
“Yeah,” Carol nodded, taking her hand away.
“And it was so long ago,” I said. “I never thought about it all that much, not back then. At the time, it seemed meaningless. A way to make a few extra bucks.” I sighed. “Beer money for the weekend. It’s only later in life that you start thinking about the implications of things.”
“Did you ever tell your wife? That there might be other kids out there who are yours?”