“Carmen, do you regret Mariah favoring him over me? I’m not insulted, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It’s not that.”
“So he is her father and you guys can admit it now,” Matt said. “Mariah’s solved the problem herself. The Dad-Daughter Dance is the perfect coming-out party. It’ll be a smooth transition. She’s debuting in her first year in junior high and no one will know you kept it quiet when she was in grade school. Please don’t tell me his ethnicity wasn’t why you kept it secret. I know people are paranoid these days and your police connection—”
Molina exploded. “Yes, his ethnicity played a part in it. So did mine. And the paranoia was mostly mine. But that was fifteen years ago in L.A. How do I bring you up to date on fifteen years of lies?”
Matt stared at her troubled features. Time to back off. He spoke solemnly, but softly, confidentially, with a tone of wry humor. “You say, ‘Bless me, Father. It has been fifteen years since my last confession.’”
He glanced at the LED clock visible on the kitchen’s microwave oven. “And make it snappy. A lot of elderly folks are waiting in line, leaning on their canes and walkers, to spend their half hour in the dark little booth enumerating a supermarket cart of venial sins when you’ve got a Dumpster of big league ones to unload.”
The kicker made her laugh. “A pity you and the confessional booths didn’t stay in the priesthood. You would be a huge improvement over Father Hernandez’s brusque, businesslike manner with penitents. So would the anonymity of a dark booth.”
“The booths are still used for oldsters at Our Lady of Guadalupe, and me.”
“You?” Then she took a deep breath and told him.
She’d been the “illegitimate” eldest bi-cultural daughter in the large traditional Hispanic family that followed when her Latina mother married a Latino man.
“How many younger siblings?” Matt asked.
“Now you sound like a sociologist. Six.”
“So your magnificent blue eyes….”
“Came from a Daddy unnamed, a best-forgotten Gringo, seducer of my seventeen-year-old mother.”
“It’s hard to grow up in a minority community with such a visible badge of difference.”
“You seem to like them.”
“I do. So Mariah has her dad’s dark eyes, and your Hispanic heritage. Did not knowing your real father haunt you?”
“No. I was too busy babysitting my half-sisters and brothers.”
“More of a nanny than a daughter?”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Now you see what I do on the radio advice show. So you were a never-ending Act of Contrition on your mother’s part,” he added.
“That’s harsh.”
“I think it was harsh.”
“We have time for another beer.” Molina stood and disappeared into the kitchen.
Matt frowned at his interlaced fingers and shook off the gesture he recognized was one of old Monsignor Janoski’s back during his own “illegitimate” Chicago childhood. Now he understood Molina’s iron self-control and utter professionalism, obviously needed working in a macho man’s field, but also to survive a family in which her very presence was a rebuke.
He was even beginning to understand better why his mother had fought so hard to grab a veneer of respectability, even if it was marriage to a loser like Effinger. At least she was married and Matt grew up as a kid with an identifiable father, however lousy.
No wonder Carmen Regina Molina was unraveling at having to confront her only daughter with her lies and evasions and self-shame. The daughter she had denied a father, as her own mother had done before her.
Matt shivered to his soul. Families came with long-standing PR as the social core of stability and future promise and safety. Maintaining that illusion took such a toll. Growing up was maybe realizing nobody was perfect, including yourself.
Molina slammed the beer bottles down on the low table.
“Short form on my family life. I had to get out of there. Worked my way through four years of college, then applied for the police force.”
“Why the police?”
“I don’t know. I’d been mocked for being a big girl, a tall girl in that culture of shorter people. I think my father may have been Swedish. Something really alien.”
Matt smiled to himself. Coming from a Chicago full of blond Polish and Nordic people, he knew one person’s “alien” was another person’s relatives.
“Anyway,” Molina said, “I thought I could make the physical. And— You’re right. I had some crazy idea that I might be able to track down my real father.”
“What did you find on the police force?”
“An administrative eagerness to employ women and minorities accompanied by deep distrust and dislike of both among all the ranks.”
“You beat that. Look at you. A tower of authority. A commander of men. A damn good torch singer, and the only woman who can make my girlfriend secretly shake in her Stuart Weitzman heels.”
“Really? Kinda like Dorothy in the Haunted Wood and I’m the Wicked Witch?”
“Naw. You’re the Iron Maiden of the Metro Police.”
“I know they call me that.”
“That’s a grudging compliment, but you know that. It wasn’t always like that.”
“God, no!” She glanced at him. “Sorry.”
“God likes to be included in the conversation, especially when you’re being honest. I’m as far from the priesthood—if that means you’re thinking of me as a judge and excommunicator—as you are from the LAPD. What happened there?”
“We made it into the force. Women and Hispanics, Afro-Americans and Asians and even Arab-Americans.”
“Ah,” Matt said, sinking like Sherlock Holmes deep into the easy chair and the two metaphorical pipes and the unfolding mysteries of Molina. “Enter Rafi Nadir.”
“He was even more alien than I was.”
“You…bonded. How?”
“What is it always? What we had in common, being minority officers. Then, when he found out that I sang in the police choir, he said I should be a soloist. He pushed me into working up an act. We trolled L.A. vintage stores for my retro blues singer nineteen-forties wardrobe. What they sold then for mere dollars.” Molina’s smile was nostalgic. “Temple Barr would have died and gone to heaven in blue silk velvet.”
“Those long, spare gowns in your singing wardrobe aren’t right for Temple. More something frilly from the thirties and fifties. You’re straight bobs or upsweeps. She’s waves and ponytails.”
“My, haven’t you become the expert.” She shook her head. “You remind me of Rafi. He’s quite a pop culture marketer, you know.”
“And adaptable. Do you realize Mariah is in the pop singer sweepstakes? If he was so supportive of your aspirations and a child was on the way, why did you split up?”
This new Mellow Molina vanished in a millisecond. “Because there was a child on the way!”
Matt flinched at her frustration.
“On the police force,” she explained, “Rafi and I weren’t just fighting prejudice from the white male officers and a lot of the public. If any staff cuts came, it would be among us minorities. While we were united against in-unit sabotage, we were also competing with each other.”
She sat back to sip some beer. “I guess you need to know the intimate details if you’re going to help me, us, with Mariah. Are you going to do that?”
“I’m stuck,” Matt said, “but how intimate?”
“I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted to establish my career, despite the odds. I like odds. I especially didn’t want to leap into motherhood after years of helping to rear half siblings. Rafi was on board with that.”
“I get it. The young Catholic Latina woman used birth control, even if it was against the Church’s position.”
“Well, the woman had to do it then, didn’t she? Nothing really effective for men, no little pink pills for girls then. Men were pill-allergic until Viagra and the little blue-for-boys pill came along. Medical insurance would cover Viagra for men, but not contraception for women. They were making single mothers. How crazy is that?”