“Timmy O’ Toole?”
“No,” she said, holding up a napkin with writing scribbled on it. “Your father. He’s in Queens.”
I tugged at my eyebrow ring. “Interesting. Are you sure?”
“Dex,” she huffed out in annoyance, getting to her feet. “You’re the one who wanted to hunt him down. We’ll we hunted him. Or I did. He’s in Queens. I found him first in the paper for winning a regatta off of Long Island. Then I traced him through the online phone book. He looks, well, he looks like you, Dex. Or at least you when you’re older. Do you want to see?”
I didn’t think she could tell any better than I could about whether the guy looked like my father or not but before I could say anything, she was pulling an article up on the iPad.
And there was picture of Curtis O’Shea. My father. He hadn’t even bothered to change his name.
I frowned, trying to feel something between me and the pixelated face staring from the screen. I don’t know if I felt anything, though I had to say there was some resemblance between me and him and more than that, well, it was him. I may have been a teenager when he left, but he was in his forties. Now he was in his sixties and the aging process had been kind to him.
He had salt and pepper hair, but it was still thick and worn parted on the side. His face looked saggy but his eyes were dark and sharp, framed by impressive eyebrows. He could have given Jack Nicholson a run for his money.
It was my dad.
I rubbed my lips together and looked away. Okay, maybe this wasn’t a good idea right now.
“Hey,” Perry said, hand on my forearm. “Let’s just forget about it. You know he’s alive. He’s out there. And if you want to say hello one day you have that option. But you don’t owe him, or me, or yourself, anything.”
I nodded and sighed. I knew all of that. “Let’s do it.”
She studied me for a moment, perhaps trying to figure out if I was in fact Dex Foray and not someone else. I couldn’t blame her.
“Let’s do it,” I repeated, putting my hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. “Let’s go meet my dad.”
She gave me a small but supportive smile and nodded her head. We left without talking, the air heavy around us as we navigated the subway system that I still knew like the back of my hand. The closer we got to Queens the more she started to wriggle around again. It was so fucking cute. I would have banged her in the nearest disgusting washroom if we weren’t about to find my father.
It wasn’t long until we were walking down the street that she had mapped out for us. It was a nice neighborhood. Not as posh as the one on the upper east side, but it was one of the nicer ones in Queens and the townhouses and duplexes would have fetched a lot of money.
It was a workday so I wasn’t completely sure if we’d find him at home, or if he even had a job. The newspaper article didn’t say much except he had a boat and was an avid sailor. I know I wanted to find him, to see him, to make some sort of amends for things that weren’t my fault, but I wasn’t about to go hunt his saggy ass down at an office or anything like that. I would give, I would put in effort, but at a certain point I stopped. There were only a few people who I’d give all for and they weren’t my father.
“This is it,” Perry said as we stopped in front of a brownstone. In some ways it looked like the one I grew up in but for the most part it was different. The ceilings were shorter, giving the house a crouched appearance even with two levels and there seemed to be an expansive side yard. There were a bunch of flowers in the front, carefully arranged into terracotta pots. I wondered if my father had a green thumb – my memories pulled up that he did – or if he had remarried.
Shitballs, he might have had a whole new family, a new son, a new life.
“Maybe this was a mistake,” I said to Perry just as the front door opened and a woman stepped out. She had grey hair piled into a bun and was wearing a Native American poncho, jeans and Crocs.
“Are you Charles?” she asked in a very Katherine Hepburn accent, all nasally and raised chin.
“Uh, no,” I said, looking at Perry for reassurance, as if she was going to tell me that I wasn’t Charles. “We’re looking for Curtis O’Shea, though.” I said. Saying his name out loud kind of felt like saying Bettlejuice.
But as far as I knew, my father was not going to appear as Michael Keaton in a black and white suit. Though, knowing my family, I wouldn’t hold anything past us.
“Oh,” she said with a raised brow, looking us over. Well, she was wearing Crocs so she couldn’t talk. “Who might you be? We aren’t expecting anyone but Charles. He’s our new nurse. Or caretaker, as Curtis insists we call him.”