My Stupid Girl (40 page)

I had things to contribute to Brandy’s
conversation but flushed furiously whenever she touched me, which happened
quite a bit. She was one of those girls who uses her hands to tells stories and
loved to grab a shoulder to emphasize a point. I couldn’t help the blushing; I
was a nerd at heart. That was never going to change. 

“So, do you live in Washington?” Brandy
asked me. 

“No, my father does, I’m visiting.” 

“Oh, do you go to college?” 

“No, I’m a… I go to high school.” I
smirked. Brandy’s mouth dropped open and she grabbed onto my forearm. Which
made me blush.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” 

“Oh my gosh, I thought I was about to go to
jail!” She fanned herself with her magazine in mock relief. I started laughing,
even though I was mortified. In a good way. I put my hands at my temples and
pulled the hair back, and let it hang in front of my face as it fell back. This
was my new hair pat. The new haircut hadn’t really cured me.

“You’re cute.” She laughed and elbowed me. 

“Thanks.” I shook my head and chuckled. 

“So, do you have a girlfriend?” She was
trying to keep a conversation going, even after my awkward reaction to her
obvious flattery.

“Um…. I used to.” I wasn’t sure how to talk
about this.

“Did you recently break up?” I could tell
she was trying to not look too pleased. Which was kind of funny, actually. As
if Brandy and I were about to start a beautiful life together and the only
thing keeping us apart was my potential girlfriend. Not the hundreds or
thousands of miles that probably separated us.

“About six months ago.” I felt sadness
spread across my face. Brandy looked understandingly at me and smiled. She
didn’t bring that up anymore and stopped teasing me about how old I was. I
could see that she was making a conscious effort not to act as flirtatious. I
had a glimmer of hope that maybe girls learned to control their charms as they
got older. It was an encouraging thought. 

We started to head through the cloud cover
back toward the ground. The speaker crackled on and my heart leaped into my
throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen we’ve begun our final
descent. Flight attendants will be around for one final check. Please stow away
all loose items, turn off all electronic devices, place your tray tables are in
their upright and locked positions, and ensure your seatbelt is securely
fastened. We’ll be on the ground in Arlington in twenty minutes.”  

He would be there, at the airport, waiting
for me. I couldn’t believe I was going to meet my birthfather in twenty
minutes. My mind was racing. My feet couldn’t stop bouncing up and down. The
college kid look was out the window. I was acting like a five-year-old on
Christmas morning. I had a fleeting thought that Anthony was going to be
disappointed when he saw me, but I shook it off as I remembered how much he had
done for me already, when he never had to. After we landed Brandy reached over
and hugged me. 

“Bye cutie. Have fun with your dad.” Her
smile made me a little hot under the collar. She grabbed her bag, kissed my
cheek, and made a beeline over my legs and down the aisle toward the front,
stepping over anyone in her path. I felt pleased with myself for no apparent
reason. Although uncomfortable, meeting Brandy had been a welcome distraction. 

I got my little carry-on suitcase and stood
in line, waiting for everyone to move, one by one, toward the exit. Very
slowly. Every second became agony. The thought that another family was waiting
for me, just a few feet away, was making my skin feel like fire. I wished I
could teleport. I would just snap my fingers and be at the head of the line and
forget everyone on here. Finally, after what seemed like a few lifetimes, the
line started slowly moving. Then I got nervous and didn’t want to move.

I got to the long terminal, and could hear
people greeting each other with shrieks of delight from women and pattering of
little running feet and the grunts of hugs. As I walked out of the security
tunnel I saw a man with black hair, big shoulders, and muddy green eyes
standing about ten feet in front of me. They were my eyes.

Next to him stood a beautiful woman with
brown curly hair who started jumping up and down when she saw me. There was a
little boy spinning in circles with hair exactly like mine. I wasn’t even
thinking anymore, my feet walked me toward that family without any effort on my
part. That was my birth father. He looked just like my grandma had described
him. As I got closer, I saw his eyes were red from potential tears and his lips
were quivering. 

“Hey.” I stopped right in front of them. My
dad’s wife put her hands up to her mouth.

“Tony, he looks just like Lindsey.” She
whispered to her husband as her eyes got as big as one of those cartoon
characters who gets scared by something. 

“David.” My dad choked, holding his arms
out and gathering me up into them. I dropped my carry-on and went for it.

Anthony Pfalmer, my birth dad, held me
tight against his chest. With all of my strength I wrapped my arms around him
and buried my face into his neck like a child would do to a loving parent after
they got hurt. I was a few inches shorter than him, so he had to bend down a
little, but we had the exact same build. Big shoulders, small waist and hips,
and he was probably hiding replicas of my chicken legs under his jeans. I felt
a tugging on my pants and looked down at a little boy with big brown eyes and
chubby cheeks. 

“Are you David?” His voice hinted at one of
those little-kid lisps.

“I am.” I wiped my eyes, glad I’d decided
against mascara. When I bent down the little boy crawled onto my knee.

“You’re my brudder.” He kicked his legs
back and forth, almost knocking me on my butt. I put my hand down on the ground
to steady us and took a long look at his face. He was seriously cute. He looked
a lot like Anthony, a round nose with high cheek bones and black hair. It
curled, though, like his mother’s amazing head of curls. 

“Are you a girl?” He’d also been taking a
long look at me, and he was puzzled.

“What?” I started laughing. I’d heard this
from little kids before.

“Your hair is weawwy wong.” He started
brushing it with his little hands. “What happened to your eye?” He touched my
scar, something no one except Lucy had ever done. 

“I fell when I was little.” I stood up but
kept hold of his hand. This was a cute kid and I liked him, if for no other
reason than that he was my brother, my real brother. I put my hand out to Marty
to try to shake it, but she leaped into my arms. 

“David, we talk about you so much. I am so
honored to meet you.” She smelled amazing, like apple juice and roses. A warmth
shot through me. “That’s Dillon and I’m Marty.” My heart expanded. I felt like
I should have always been here and that, and in a strange way, I had.  They had
known about me and been thinking of me, which was an amazing thing to discover.
We walked quietly, little Dillon in my arms talking in a high voice about my
earrings and how I really was a girl. He talked all the way back to the house.
He talked as we walked in, as they showed me around. He talked as I commented
on the extreme neatness of the house. Marty got a kick out of that; apparently
my need for cleanliness was inherited from my birth father. Dillon stopped
talking to show me his room. Like the rest of the house, it was filled with
high-quality things – not showy, but still fancy.

“You like it?” Anthony asked my opinion of
the house as Dillon and I made our way into the kitchen. 

“Yeah, it’s great. Amazing, actually.”

“I designed it, Marty decorated it. We’ve
had a business going for the last few years.”

“So are you a contractor?” I walked around
the open downstairs again, marveling at the multi-tiered ceiling and the way
that the kitchen connected seamlessly with the dining room and living room.
Everything about the house seemed simple, yet elegant. Every chair and lamp and
picture fit perfectly. Nothing was too much, and there were no empty spaces.
And it all seemed inviting. The few really nice houses I had been in before had
a lot of zones or rooms that seemed kind of off-limits, like the Peterson’s
dining room, or Isaiah’s entire house. But every room in this place invited me
to come in. It felt like a home.

“Kind of,” my birth father replied, “I did
draw this house up, but it looked like chicken scratch.” He laughed a carefree
laugh and shrugged. “We had to get an architect to do real plans. I did build
most of it, though.” He was looking around with accomplishment, then his eyes
landed on my face. A million smile lines exploded around his cheeks and eyes.
Even with those, his face was joyful and young. The lines were more from a lot
of smiling and less from old skin.

I guessed he was in his early thirties. We
looked a lot alike. People might mistake us for brothers if we walked around
together. Our body build and hair was identical. Our faces, however, were very
different. Only our eyes, the exact same shade of hazel, matched.

“Marty said I look like my mom.” I tried
not to look or sound sad. I was still kind of bummed that she wasn’t here.  It
would have been about five million times cooler, in this already amazing day,
to have met both my birth parents together. For as much as I had wondered about
Anthony Pfalmer, I had wondered about Lindsey Hurst. And asking Anthony all the
questions for both of them seemed not quite right.

“You do, you have her face. That long nose
and narrow jaw, and your cheek bones. I swear, if you two looked in a two sided
mirror together your faces would match up.” He cocked his head to the side. “I
hope you’re don’t mind, but I asked her to come meet you.” 

“No!” I about screamed at him. “I don’t
mind at all. Is she coming now?”   

“When I talked to her we worked out getting
her a train ticket. So she should be.” 

“Of course it's okay! Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, put yourselves in our position. We
gave you up for adoption. Most people are usually bitter about that kind of
thing.” His eyes looked sad when he spoke, but still comfortable, unapologetic.
Like he knew who he was and was at peace with the decision he’d made. I
realized that there was a time, not so long ago, that I had been bitter about
it. 

“You were young,” I said, trying to comfort
him. He laughed and nodded his head.

“We were young, that’s true. But that’s not
all of it.” He sat down at a beautiful mahogany table. I followed. “If I knew
then what I know now, I would have kept you. But that’s one of the tricky
things about life – we can only make decisions based on what we know, not on
what we might know in the future. At that age, the age when we had you,
everything seemed like it was going two hundred miles per hour, and the only
way we were going to stop was if we crashed into something.”

I understood. That was the first time I had
realized that I wasn’t always going to feel this way. The feeling of not
knowing if I was coming or going and that everything was out of control. Relief
is not the word for what I felt just then, but it was pretty close.  

“We wanted the best for you, and we knew
that were weren’t going to be able to provide for that. Not even close.”

“Fifteen? Wow.” 

“I know. We thought that because she hadn’t
had a period yet that she couldn’t get pregnant.”

“How old was she?”

“Fourteen.” It was the first time that he
had looked sad all day. I had no idea they were that young when they had given
me up. It made a lot more sense now. They were years younger than I was right
now, and I sure didn’t feel like I would have been able to handle a baby.

“I have spent a long time blaming myself
for the way Lindsey’s life turned out and that I lost my first son.” He wiped a
tear out of his left eye soundlessly. “I wanted to meet you a long time ago,
but was afraid to.” He smiled tenderly at me. “What you were six I started this
company I’m running right now. I was making good money so I wanted to make sure
you had an account. I was pleased to find out that your father…” he pulled his
collar, uncomfortable saying “father” and not referring to himself, “..that he
already had a savings account for you. He gave me the information and let me
deposit money.”

“I was shocked when I saw that. Thank you.”
I just realized I had never thanked him. He waved his hands at me, willing me
to stop. 

“When I gave my number I asked him to keep
it unless you asked about me.” 

“He has had your number since I was six?” I
couldn’t believe it. That was three years before I had gone to live with a
foster family because my adopted father had almost ripped my eye out. Anthony
had wanted contact with me for a long time, and maybe things would have been so
different if we had met before today. If I had just asked. A surge of emotions
rushed through me, pulling me in different directions. He could see the
struggle on my face.

“I’m sorry. I’m just a coward.” He put his
hand out and placed it on mine. It was big, like mine were. 

“My mom died a few months after I was
born.” 

“Jane died?” His mouth flew open and he put
his hands on his head like he was about to pull his hair out from the roots. I
guess she had made a good impression on Anthony Pfalmer. “Did your father get
remarried?” 

“No, it’s just been me and him.” 

“So you’ve had no mother this whole time?”
He started pacing, hands on his hips, bent over a little like he was going to
be sick. 

“No, actually.” I smiled with confident
reassurance. “My mom’s mom, my grandma, was about the most amazing mother I
could ever ask for. I live with her right now.” I realized too late what I had
said. I had already decided I wasn’t going to say anything about the way my dad
had treated me while I was growing up. Too much information too soon, and it
was going to mess with my “what if” avoidance to bring it all out in the open
right now.