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“Call me Oscar, please.”
“Oscar, we’re here because my mom was friends with Sabrina, and she had this picture of the two of you from a summer you spent together.” Cash handed Oscar his phone, which had the picture that his mom had emailed to both of us on it. “Do you remember that summer?”
Oscar picked up his glasses from the side table and put them on. When he looked at the screen his eyes filled with tears.
He nodded slowly. “I do. It was the best summer of my life. I met Sabrina in Savannah. I was just stopping for gas on my way back up here from visiting friends in Florida. She was there shopping. I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as her. I asked her if I could sketch her and I think she thought I was hitting on her, but I honestly wasn’t. I’d just wanted to capture her beauty. Somehow, I convinced her to come up here and sit for me.” He handed the phone back to Cash as he stood up and walked into the dining area. “She came up on Memorial Day weekend and didn’t leave until Labor Day when I left to go abroad. I had a two-year fellowship in Paris that I’d been accepted to before I met your mom. I almost didn’t go,” he explained as he walked back into the room with a large leather portfolio. “And most days, I wish I hadn’t.”
He set it down on the coffee table and opened it up. It was filled with paintings and drawings of my mom. There had to be at least a hundred of them on all sorts of different sized papers and flat canvases. As he flipped through the pieces, I was struck by how different they all were yet somehow each one captured her essence. Or at least what I thought was her essence.
“Wow. Those are amazing.”
He lowered back down onto the chair across from us. “You know, I tried to find Sabrina, on the internet. That’s when I learned that she’d passed. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. It was a long time ago. I was five.” I kept petting Mona’s head as I took a deep breath. “I was born the May after the summer you spent together.”
When he didn’t respond I took another deep breath.
“Recently, I found out that the man I thought was my biological father, wasn’t.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. And after speaking to Cash’s mom and putting the timeline together. I was wondering if you might be willing to, it’s okay if you don’t want to, I totally understand—”
“Yes,” Oscar spoke over my rambling.
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’ll take a paternity test.”
I let out a breath that I might have been holding since we walked inside, or since I found out that James Comfort wasn’t my father, or since my grandparents came and took me away… However long I’d been holding it, it felt amazing to finally exhale.
