MY BIOLOGICAL FATHER HANDED ME A BRAND NEW CAR FOR MY 17TH BIRTHDAY, THEN TOLD MY STEPDAD, “NOW HE KNOWS WHO HIS REAL FATHER IS.”
“Eli,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what happened.”
“Okay,” I said, not offering him anything more than that yet.
He cleared his throat, the kind of sound people make when they’ve rehearsed something and it still doesn’t come out easily.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” he continued. “About real fathers. That wasn’t fair to Marcus, or to you.”
“No,” I agreed. “It wasn’t.”
“I still don’t understand the paperwork thing,” he said. “But I’ve had some time to sit with it.”
“You don’t have to understand it,” I said. “It’s not really about you.”
I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, slower than before, like he was working hard to keep his voice steady.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Can I still be part of your life?” he asked. “In whatever way still makes sense to you?”
I thought about that question longer than he probably expected me to.
“Maybe,” I said eventually. “Not the way you were before. Twice a year and a big gesture doesn’t cut it anymore. If you want something real, it has to look different than that.”
“What would different look like?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly. “Showing up on ordinary days might be a start. Not just the ones that make a good story.”
“I can try that,” he said quietly. “I don’t have a great track record with ordinary days. Never really practiced at it.”
“Neither did I, until recently,” I said. “Turns out it’s a skill like anything else.”
He didn’t have an immediate answer for that, and I didn’t rush him toward one, letting the silence do whatever work it needed to do between us.
We hung up without any promises attached, which felt, strangely, like the most honest conversation we’d had in years.
Mom was waiting in the kitchen when I hung up, pretending to wipe down a counter that was already clean.
“How was it?” she asked, not quite looking at me.
