“Lilith knows she’s adopted. Her mother was always open with her about that from as early of an age as she could understand it. But Beth has not yet allowed me to tell her who I am. It’s unclear if she ever will let me, but I don’t want to press the issue right now out of fear that they won’t let me see her anymore. I wouldn’t ever try to steal her away. I only want to be in her life, to help look out for her, and to make sure what happened to me never happens to her.” A tear fell. “I love her so much. And I just want her to know that, even if I have to show her, rather than tell her. She’s the reason I can’t ever leave Michigan, Landon. I wasn’t completely honest back in California when I said the reason was that I couldn’t leave my father. It’s Lilith. Only Lilith. If it weren’t for her, I would’ve stayed in L.A. I would’ve never left you, wouldn’t have even come back here at all.”
Landon shook his head in disbelief. “Holy shit, Rana. This is—”
“I know. I know this is a shock.”
“Holy shit,” he repeated.
He was silent for the longest time. I couldn’t blame him. His girlfriend suddenly had a ten-year-old child. Not to mention all of the similarities between Lilith’s situation and his own.
“Say something, Landon.”
He just sat down and placed his head in his hands. I knew then that my revelation wasn’t something he was going to accept very easily, certainly not in the short time he had left in Michigan.
The days that followed Landon’s return to L.A. were the hardest.
At my worst moments, I seriously wondered if I would ever see him again. I was looking for verbal reassurance that everything was going to turn out okay when he hadn’t exactly given that to me. I think the shock of my news was really too much for him.
The one good thing: he told me he started seeing a therapist. Landon assured me that it wasn’t only because of his need to deal with his feelings about my revelation. It was something that he felt was long overdue. He had never really dealt with his abandonment issues, nor had he ever spoken to anyone about the shame he felt over his past profession.
It was simply too much for him to absorb all at once, first the fact that I’d given up a child and then the realization that Lilith was, in fact, my daughter. I knew it just hit way too close to home. It was amazing how parallel situations could impact both of our lives in similar but different ways. We were on opposite sides of essentially the same life circumstance.
My story couldn’t have been more different from his birth mother’s, but the outcome was the same in his eyes; Beverly and I had each relinquished the rights to our children. And I imagined he had a really difficult time separating his own situation from Lilith’s. His mother was no longer around, however, to serve as the recipient of any lingering resentment.
I was.
PRETTY DAMN MAGNIFICENT
My father came by one afternoon and caught me in the midst of a really down day.
He threw his keys on the counter. “You sad, Ranoona?”
My head was resting over my forearms on the kitchen table when I mumbled, “Yes.”
“I have warm pita bread.”
“Warm pita bread doesn’t solve everything, Papa.”
“No, but we have butter. Warm pita and butter solve a lot.” He winked, and I couldn’t help but smile as I lifted my head up.
My father split a large circle of bread in half before grabbing the butter from the refrigerator. He sat back down and buttered me a slice.
I took a bite. “So, I saw you went to visit Lilith recently.”
He was quiet and simply nodded.
“Yeah. She told me she got another envelope,” I said.
About six months ago, Lilith announced that she believed God had been leaving her money. For a while, I just listened to her stories without thinking anything of it. She said envelopes that had her name written on the front would just show up, either under her front door or sometimes tied to something in the yard. The reason she thought it was God leaving them was because of the religious pictures on each one. I asked her to show me one of them and immediately realized that they were the donation envelopes from my father’s church, St. Cecilia’s.
Papa always knew her whereabouts but had never really talked about her much. Finding out about the envelopes was the first time I realized how much she’d been on his mind over the years. He later confessed that he’d thought of her often. He knew about my arrangement to see her each week and never tried to talk me out of it. The envelopes were proof that I had underestimated his feelings for his granddaughter. He apparently left the envelopes occasionally when he knew her parents were at work and that she was in school. He was careful not to get caught.
Lilith wanted to know why God didn’t know how to spell her name, because he’d always leave out the ‘H’ at the end. The funny thing was, that was exactly how my father pronounced her name—“Lilit.” So, to this day, she believed that God was sending her money and that He needed spelling lessons.
I couldn’t help but laugh one afternoon when she asked me if I thought God would be offended if she spent some of his money on a Brooklyn Beckham poster. I’d told her to go for it, that God made her the way she is, and fancying handsome boys is part of human nature.
“I told Landon about Lilith, Papa.”
He momentarily stopped buttering his bread. “What he say?”
I knew that worried my father, who was old-fashioned and would have never considered taking up with someone who already had a child. Granted, his choosing a young virgin to marry totally bit him in the ass when my sheltered mother went off the rails into perpetual rebellion, never to return.
“He was shocked. You know he’s adopted. So, he has a lot of unresolved issues with that. I didn’t want to tell him, but I had to, because I’ve fallen in love with him.”
My father looked surprised to hear those words coming out of my mouth. I’d never even admitted to him that I liked anyone let alone loved someone.
He seemed to ponder my words then nodded. “I see.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.” He smiled. “Happy.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just afraid that he won’t be able to get over it.”
Papa always had the same answer for everything. “Pray to Blessed Mother. She fix.”
I normally laughed at him. I mean, this was the same man who swore to have seen the Virgin Mary’s image in a piece of toast. But on this particular day, after my father left, I went over to the statue he’d brought—the one whose primary purpose had been to protect me from Lenny—and prayed.
Later that day, I was checking Landon’s app as I normally did, and something troubling was on the screen.
It was a note that said: Landon’s Lunch Box is temporarily closed. Please check back soon for updates.
Freaking out, I picked up the phone and dialed him immediately.
“Landon, what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is the truck shut down?”
“It’s in transition.”
“Transition?”
“Yes. I sold it. Got a buyer unexpectedly.”
“You sold the truck? Why didn’t you tell me you were selling it?”
“I was going to tell you. I didn’t want to give you false hope until I signed on the dotted line. Today’s literally the first day it’s shut down. I wanted to make sure I had everything else in order before I told you.”
“Everything else in order? What do you mean?”
“I mean…I’m getting out of my apartment, and I have to get rid of the Range Rover.”
“What’s happening?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m moving to Michigan. But I didn’t tell you yet because it still might take a while to sell my car and close out all of my business here. But a buyer came about unexpectedly for the truck, so I had to take advantage of that while I could, since that was the biggest hurdle.”