She also still had a task so daunting that she kept finding fault with every moment when she could have performed it. It took her two weeks to admit to herself that, in fact, no time on no day was a good time to call Tom. She finally chose a Monday at five o’clock in Denver.
“Pip!” Tom said. “I was afraid you’d never call.”
“Really. Why’s that.”
“Leila and I think about you all the time. We miss you.”
“Leila misses me. Really. It’s not a problem that I’m your daughter?”
“Sorry, hang on. I’m shutting the door.”
There was a fumbling, a bonk, a rustle, a clunk.
“Pip, sorry,” Tom said. “What are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you I know everything.”
“Yikey. OK.”
“It’s not what you think. I didn’t read your document.”
“Ah, good. Good. Excellent.” Tom’s relief was audible.
“I deleted it,” she said. “But Andreas told me who you were, before he died. That made the research easy, and then my mom told me everything.”
“Jesus. She told you. It’s amazing you’re even speaking to me.”
“You are my father.”
“I shudder to imagine her version.”
“It’s better than no story, which is what you gave me.”
“That’s a fair point. Although sometime I hope you’ll give me a chance to tell my side.”
“You had your chance.”
“True enough. I had my reasons, but it’s a fair point. And I’m assuming this is why you called me? To tell me I blew it with you?”
“No. I called because I want you to come out here and see my mother.”
Tom laughed. “I’d rather be dropped in the middle of the Congolese civil war.”
“You cared enough about her to keep her secret for her.”
“I suppose … in a sense…”
“She obviously still matters to you.”
“Pip, listen, I’m very sorry I didn’t tell you anything. Leila’s been after me to call you. I should have listened to her.”
“Well, now I’m telling you how you can make it up to me. You can get on a plane and come out here.”
“Why, though? Why would I do that?”
“Because I won’t have anything to do with you if you don’t.”
“I can tell you, from our side, that would be a loss.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see my mom again anyway? Just once, after all these years? All I’m asking is that you guys forgive each other. I want to be allowed to see both of you, but I can’t do it if I feel like I’m betraying one of you whenever I see the other.”
“You don’t have to feel that way with me. I don’t have any claim on you.”
“But I have a claim on you. And you’ve never had to do anything for me. This is the one thing I’m asking.”
Tom sighed heavily across the time zones. “I don’t suppose there’s any liquor in your mother’s house?”
“I’ll make sure there’s liquor.”
“And we’re talking — when? Next month?”
“No. This week. Maybe Friday. The longer you guys think about it, the worse it will get.”
Again Tom sighed. “I could do Thursday. My Friday nights are for Leila.”
Pip felt a twinge of resentment and was tempted to insist on Friday. But the road back to friendship with Leila was looking long enough already.
“One other thing,” she said.
“Yep,” Tom said.
“I’ve been looking at DI every week. I keep thinking you’ll do a big story about Andreas.”
“He wasn’t well, Pip. I saw him at the end, I saw him go over the cliff. The only thing I feel is sadness. Leila’s annoyed by the postmortem adulation, but I find it hard to begrudge him. He was the most remarkable person I ever met.”
“The Express is still waiting for me to write something about him. I feel the same thing you do, sadness. But I also feel like somebody should tell the real story.”
“About the murder? It’s your call. One of the costs would be the girl, the one who helped him. There could still be legal consequences for her.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But he left a confession, which his people covered up. There’s definitely a story if you want to pursue it.”
Was Tom also worried about his own complicity in the murder coming to light? Probably not, if he believed that Pip hadn’t read his memoir.
“OK,” she said. “Thank you.”
When her mother returned from work, Pip explained to her what had to happen. She was relieved that her mother didn’t immediately have a meltdown. But the reason she didn’t was that the entire concept made no sense to her.
“What on earth did I ever do that needs to be forgiven?”
“Um — had me and didn’t tell him? That’s pretty big.”
“How can he blame me for that? He abandoned me. He never wanted to hear from me again. And I gave him that. Like everything else. He always got everything he wanted. Just like my father.”
“Still, at some point, you should have let him know about me. On my eighteenth birthday, whatever. It was wrong of you not to. It was spiteful.”
Her mother huffed and puffed at this, but finally she nodded. “If you say so,” she said. “And only because it’s you saying it.”
“Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive. You raised me all by yourself. You said no to the money that everyone else in your family couldn’t resist. And you were stronger than Tom. You put an end to it — he couldn’t do it. You got everything you wanted. You won! And that’s why you can afford to forgive him. Because you won. Right?”
Her mother frowned.
“You’re also a billionaire,” Pip said. “That’s a kind of winning, too.”
The next morning they rode the bus into Santa Cruz. It was a clear cold morning between storms. Homeless people were wearing their sleeping bags like shawls, Christmas bows were shivering on lampposts, the sky was full of wheeling seagulls. A hairdresser at Jillz trimmed Pip’s mother’s hair in a flurry of split ends. Then Pip took her for a manicure, and it was Anabel, not her old mother, who instructed the Vietnamese manicurist not to cut her cuticles, Anabel who explained to Pip that cutting cuticles was a racket, because they grew back quickly and needed to be cut again. It was Anabel who briskly worked through racks of dresses, through store after store, and continued to reject things long after Pip’s own patience was exhausted. The dress that she finally deemed “adequate” was vintage and full-skirted, sexy in a prairie-schoolteacher way, with twin lines of buttons on the bodice. Pip had to admit that it was the most suitable dress they’d seen all morning.
She’d asked Jason to get a Zipcar and fetch Tom from the San Jose airport, so that she could stand guard over her mother and try to keep her calm. “Bring Choco, too,” she said.
“He’ll just be in the way,” Jason said.
“I want him in the way. Otherwise my mom’s going to focus on her freak-out. She’ll meet you, she’ll meet Choco, and, oh yeah, here’s the ex she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years.”
On Thursday morning, another storm arrived. By late afternoon the rain was drumming so hard on the roof that Pip and her mother had to raise their voices. Darkness had fallen early, and the lights had flickered several times. Pip had prepared a bean soup and laid in other supplies, including ingredients for a Manhattan. After her mother had showered, Pip applied a blow-dryer to her hair, brushing it and fluffing it. “Let’s give you some makeup, too.”