Her Pop looked flat. Gray and flat, like a deflated balloon with her dad’s nose. It took Xenia a few minutes to get to the bed, wishing life into him but dreading that he might wake. One heart attack two weeks ago had made urgent everything unfinished in his life. His eyes fluttered open. “Did you find him?” he asked.
She considered not telling him--or of lying. She smoothed his hair while she decided. “Yes,” she said, and she thought of the other old man she had traveled to Berkeley to meet, leaving Philadelphia’s frigid snow to find a ferocious green and plum blossom scented hill and a house above the university. Down the hill was where the old man taught philosophy to students learning to judge right from wrong.
Xenia mulled over the secret that her late mom kept all her life--how it was like one of the tulips in the vase by this bed, so complex and passionate, but without defining odor to betray it. Xenia’s Pop was not her pop. Her ace reporter big brother uncovered the other man, even though there had been no sign since their mom’s return from driving him to the airport one summer night in 1954. Xenia was the accidental result of a lover’s farewell, or maybe a quarrel, on the way to catch a flight out of town. Were there two tickets or one?
Her mom missed her period for more than a month and then almost left Pop out of shame and regret. But Pop put his arms around her and comforted her. He said he’d adore the baby, too. They went on to have a third child: the brother who was now so jolted by Pop’s revelation of mom’s affair that he refused to talk to any of them.
Xenia leaned in to her Pop’s pillow. “I didn’t like the Professor,” she said. What she didn’t say was that the old man agreed to lunch at a restaurant but her half siblings from his marriage were off limits.
“That’s okay, Kiddo,” Pop said with a deep breath. “I’m the one who wanted you.”
