Page 30 of Center of Gravity

“So how’s everything going there?” He asked it in a way that I could tell was more than just friendly concern for my welfare.

Richard hired me in my mid-twenties and was a huge factor in escorting me up the ladder toward partnership, which I expected to happen within the next year. He was in many ways a second father figure, but I’d always had an idea that the relationship was subject to fluctuation, based upon my performance. I was, by every account, a model employee. I’d always liked the reliability of my job and routine and was only just now wrestling with the strange feelings of discontent that had taken hold of me. They could’ve been easily attributable to my dad’s death, or Sean, but I wasn’t sure. It felt like more than that.

“It’s moving along all right. What’s up?”

“Sean said he’s tried to reach you several times and can’t.”

I shut my eyes, my jaw clenching.

“Cell service can be finicky out here, but I haven’t seen any emails or voicemails from him. Something wrong with my accounts?”

“Well, Sean had some questions about the handling of a few.” I heard Richard shut the door to his office, then his voice lowered. “I think he might be in over his head. You think you could come in and talk to him? Stabilize a few things?”

My sabbatical was supposed to be Sean’s trial run to track him into a higher position, the one I’d vacate when I got my promotion. I had no intention of trying to ruin his career just because I was bitter, but it sounded as if he was busy doing a fine job of it himself, if I was reading between the lines correctly.

Just what I needed. I pressed my knuckles to the ridge between my brows. It was my mess with Sean in the first place and I oversaw the accounts, which made his mess my mess as well.

“Sure thing. I’ll be in tomorrow morning and I can telecommute every day after that until I get back next week.”

“That’d probably be best.”

I hung up and thumbed through my call log. I was right, Sean hadn’t left any messages. All the calls had come late at night after his wife was asleep. I called his office line and got his voicemail, so I left a brusque message letting him know that I’d be in the following day and expected all of our accounts to be ready for me to pore over. It was more warning than he deserved.

After Alex left,I sat in the kitchen reading through the letters in the box he’d found. I was on my third cup of coffee and the fog was finally clearing. As expected, I’d been wobbly and off while Alex was there, going back and forth in my mind over just sleeping with him and being done with it and continuing to ignore the temptation of him.

It wasn’t as if I was afraid of casual affairs. I’d had plenty. And a number of those had come after Sean. They were impersonal, flash-in-the-pan encounters thanks to Grindr, like the one with Alex. I’d forced myself into them out of some idea that they’d help me get over Sean faster. Jury was still out on that. The first hook-up after Sean had been predictably depressing and left me wallowing in comparisons. Sean’s slender fingers to the other guy’s thick ones, Sean’s mouth, his cock, his…everything. But it had gotten easier after that. Satisfying in a sexual release kind of way, but lacking theoomphthat came from real attraction and connection.

The problem was that Ididfeel a connection with Alex, or at least a strong attraction, but part of me remained tender from the fallout with Sean, even now, and I had no desire to start another relationship. I was afraid that sex with someone I liked but who made no sense having in my life might just spread the bruise instead. If I put our lives on a diagram, we’d be heading in opposite directions, so why tempt fate just because the sex would probably be amazing?

I pulled the shoebox back to me again. There was a three-inch stack of correspondence bound with a rubber band that appeared to be every letter my mom had sent my father early in their relationship when he’d been a teaching assistant and she a secretary in Jersey. The photographs were mostly ones I hadn’t seen before. There was Atlantic City, my dad’s arm draped loosely around my mom’s shoulder, her smiling face and fingers flashing a peace sign captured as she’d blinked. The better version where her eyes were open lay framed and wrapped in one of the boxes of stuff I was keeping. I remembered studying the picture as a teen, wondering over these kids who had become my parents. Now I saw myself in my father’s strong jawline, the straight brow that looked as if it was underlining my forehead. My eyes were my mother’s, at least in shape and coloring. The twinkle and lightness she’d had in hers, though, I didn’t think I’d inherited that.

I flipped through a few other stacks of photos. Mom and Dad in Yosemite. Dad receiving an award. Mom’s hands laid atop her swollen belly. Some group photos with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Dad with a lanky guy’s arm slung low around his waist standing in front of a podium in the auditorium of New City College in Jersey, where Dad had been a professor.

I studied that one. There was something vaguely familiar about the guy. But there was no information on the back of the photo, so I moved on to the other stack of letters. These, instead of being from a set decade, seemed to span several, the first envelopes yellowed and faded, the last one in the pack as fresh as if it had been mailed yesterday. There wasn’t a return address on any of them, but they were all addressed to my father in the same hand.

I started with the most recent, dated a month before my father died, then I went back to the first. Most of them were sent to my dad’s office at the college, but more recent ones were addressed directly to the house. I kept waiting for searing anger, for an overwhelming sense of hurt or betrayal, but neither came as I sat there.

After I’d read through all of them, I called Summer.

“Did you know Dad had an affair?”

“What? Hang on.” I heard a curse, a door shutting, then silence. “Okay. Now what?”

“I’ve got a box of letters on the table here that was in the air register. A bunch of them are from Mom when they were first dating, but there’s a whole stack from some other woman after he met Mom. After they were married. I mean, there’s one here from a month before he died.”

“Who is it?” she was whispering in the phone, though I wasn’t sure why.

“I have no idea. There’s no return address and there’s only a letter for the signature, an ‘M’. ”

“God, who do we know of their friends whose name starts with an ‘M’?”

“A lot of people, really.” It was far too late in life for this to be a devastating realization, but it still landed in my chest like a weight and not even necessarily because he’d cheated on my mother—though there was some part of that weighing on me—but because it meant I knew him even less than I thought I had.

My father had always fulfilled the role of Father, capital F, but there were pieces of him I’d never been able to cut through, layers to him that I sensed but was never given access to. My mom had been full of personality and quirks that made her breathe in my mind to this day. I could tell you what she’d say on any topic. Dad, he’d remained part mystery, a man composed by his dogma and dedication rather than characterization. Maybe that’s what all fathers were like. I didn’t know. When he’d started painting the Civil War figurines, I’d been surprised. Even though he had been a history professor, I’d never known him to be interested in the Civil War. The books on our bookshelves and the eras he’d talked about most often centered around Russia, the Cold War, and Nazi Germany.

And now here was another man, also my father, who’d had an extended affair, who’d cared enough to save all of his letters and photographs too shitty to earn a place on the mantel.

“Rob,” Summer prodded me, “what do the letters say?”