“The name was Tommy,” my wife said from behind me. “Nobody’s called you that since high school.”
I turned around and she was holding our house phone in one hand and a yellow legal pad in the other like she’d been preparing for this conversation for weeks.
I asked who called.
She said, “A woman from Rockford. She asked if you still drove the red Chevy.”
I sold that truck in 2009.
That’s when I stopped trying to act confused.
My wife sat down across from me at the kitchen table and said she’d hired a private investigator after finding hotel charges on our Visa last winter. Not because she thought I was having some dramatic double life. Because none of my stories lined up anymore. Too many little lies stacked on top of each other for too many years.
The list wasn’t random.
Every date connected to the same woman.
Her name was Dana.
We dated before I met my wife. Briefly. Nothing serious, at least that’s what I always told myself. Then Dana got pregnant right before I moved to Wisconsin. She told me once over the phone the baby might be mine. I panicked, mailed money twice, then stopped answering when I got engaged.
Twenty-six years passed.
Apparently Dana’s son found me online after she died in February.
The April 14 date wasn’t my brother’s arrest. I used that as cover so I could drive to Illinois and meet him without telling my wife the truth first.
My wife already knew all of it by then.
The private investigator found the DNA test I’d taken three months earlier.
Positive.
I just sat there staring at the pages while the coffee maker kept sputtering beside us.
Finally my wife said she was done being married to someone who edited his own life depending on who was asking questions.
She moved into an apartment in Sun Prairie two weeks later.
Last Saturday I met my son again at a diner outside Rockford, and for the first time in his life somebody at the table called me Dad out loud.