Chapter 33

A terrified Candace Willis stood in front of her father’s apartment and buzzed for admittance. Terrified because she so wanted to talk to the man about the untalkaboutable: but, could she resist the almost irresistible impulse to defy her daddy’s command. She’d be seeing.

Julian Willis buzzed her in. He smiled his welcome, but then, frowned his askance at the look on her face.

“Candace?” I said. I didn’t know which of us looked the more concerned.

“Just visiting, Dad, like we planned,” she said, “lunch.” She sounded earnest, something.

“Dad? Not Father?” I said.

“Hmm, uh-yes, I forgot,” she said. She clearly had something serious on her mind and I figured it to be not good news for me; well, experience teaches.

“Hmm,” I said. “You seem ... something.”

“No, no, I’m good,” she said. “So, how are you?”

“Okay, I guess,” I said. “Getting along a day at a time.”

“Dad, I mean Father, I know you’ve heard about Marian and her ex,” she said, trying her best to steer him away from his clear suspiousosity. I guess I looked surprised that she knew that I knew about Marian and her ex.

I’d sat down, and now I sagged back in my seat. She was concerned about my feelings regarding my almost new love of my life. I was feeling kinda down because of the fact that Marian’d not only dumped me for money, but had hooked up with a guy who was without a doubt after her money. Was I also pissed? I guess I was. They’d be broke soon enough; I was sure of that.

The guy was a bum and a gambler. She and I had talked about him often enough in times gone by. He’d dumped her once already because of her mastectomy. He’d be doing it again as soon as he got control of or spent all of her money.

“Yeah, I heard,” I said. “It’s none of my business anymore, but I won’t kid you. It does hurt.”

“I can imagine,” she said. “But are you okay?”

“I would be if you and your mom would stop pressuring me to chase women. The only woman for me is your mom, and she’s unavailable. Still, Marian would have been a good fit for me I think, but well...” I said. She nodded, but I still had a nagging feeling that there was something I was missing.

“So how are you and Daniel doing these days. I mean now that you are back from London,” I said. I was actually very interested in how they were doing. Newlyweds almost always had challenges as soon as the beds got made the morning after the wedding night.

“Real good, well, you can imagine, Father,” she said. She could see that I was hoping she’d have stuck with the ‘dad’ thing. She began to fidget. My turn to notice stuff—again.

“Candace, although there are those who might legitimately argue the point, I am not the village idiot. What’s going on. Something’s going on. Come on, don’t be trying to snow a snowman,” I said.

My daughter suddenly looked angry, very angry, and that with me!

“Daddy!” she said.

“Daddy?” I said. She knew what I meant.

“Yes, fucking daddy!” she blurted. Her language got my immediate attention. Whatever it was that she was here for it wasn’t my relationship with Marian Carton. That might turn out to be a related matter, but it clearly was not the main matter; I’d have put money on that one.

“Excuse me?” I said, reacting to her language, and not having a clue what she was about. She’d been sitting, now she stood and started pacing the floor.

“Daddy, I do not want to be the one to first, hurt you more than you have already been hurt. And second, I do not want to be the one to keep you in the dark about things that you should not be kept in the dark about,” she said. She was still pacing, but stopping now and again to say her piece.

“Then don’t,” I said. “Believe me I’ve been hurt before; I’ve been lied to and kept in the dark before; humiliated like nobody ever was before. Nothing you can say, so long as it’s the truth and not meant to deliberately hurt me, is going to make me think ill of you. She continued to pace, but she was thinking; likely about the wisdom of telling me what she obviously wanted to tell me.

“Just do it,” I said. “If you don’t somebody, likely somebody from the Willis clan, will eventually tell me. It might as well be you.” She stopped, stared at me and sighed. She took her seat again on my cheap ass divan.

“Daddy, my other daddy, and he is that, told us,” she said.

“Told you? Told you what? And who is us?” I said.

“The us is Mom, Bea, and me,” she said. My eyes narrowed. I was at a loss as to where she was going with this. But it was clear I was not going to like it—at all.

“So?” I said.

“The what is about your injuries, disabilities, all of it, not just the HIV,” she said.

I was stunned. I knew, instinctively knew, what she meant. I did not know, not yet, how he found out, but he had. Sitting in my newish rocking chair across from my daughter I was viscerally humiliated. No one can know how humiliating it was to be dickless and for other people to know about it, anybody to know about it.

“I-I-I see,” I said. My tone of voice, I knew, was barely audible. I could feel my face, actually feel it; I had no expression on it, none. It was like a dead part of me.

I had initially thought that my Candace had come to pressure me to find me a woman: like all of them, the women, had been doing or seeming to do, over the past weeks and months. Ever since Marian had broken it off with me. Well, in a sense. The fact was that I had been the one to break it off with her because, as I saw it, she had betrayed me. But now...