Finally she spoke. “I’d like to ask a favor.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not questioning that you are who you say you are, but this isn’t a good time right now.”
“It’s just one thing and it won’t take long.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like you to take a blood test.”
“A blood test?”
“I just want to know for sure,” she said.
“Why?”
“I suppose that anyone who always knew who their father was wouldn’t understand.”
“A lot of people don’t know who their parents are, and a lot of people wish they had different ones.”
“Does it seem like an obsession to you?”
“I don’t know you and I don’t want to judge you.”
“I just want to know.”
“Have you asked your mother’s old boyfriend?”
“I haven’t been able to find him. At least not yet.”
I frowned and chugged the rest of my drink.
“It’s late,” I said. “I have to go. I sympathize with your predicament but there’s really nothing I can do.”
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s not logical, but it’s become the most important thing in the world right now. I can’t see beyond it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “To be honest, back then when your mother suggested the possibility, I never thought that I could have been your father. You’re looking in the wrong direction. You need to find the other man.”
And with that I walked over to the cashier’s desk, paid the bill, and left.
* * *
In my hotel room, I logged into Netflix and perused the menu for something to watch. This night, though, nothing seemed to satisfy. I found it difficult to distract myself from the issue at hand.
She was an intruder, I told myself indignantly. She had no right to impose herself upon me at this stage of the game. The window had long passed. People made decisions and moved on, and that’s what her mother and I had done so long ago. And now here she was muddying up the waters of the past.
The bookstore sponsoring the reading the next evening had scheduled the event in the auditorium of an art gallery. As I commenced my introductory banter, I scanned the standing-room-only audience but caught no glimpse of her. I requested that the lights be lowered and read a dark fantasy about a rock group that discovers a cursed book high in the Himalayan Mountains. One by one they become bloodthirsty and murderous as they succumb to the spirits of strange creatures that inhabit the manuscript.