Chapter 2: The Shock

"Are you going to get that?" Julie asked. She was busy typing on her laptop. Henry sat in the high chair at the tiny table just off of the kitchen bar in their one-bedroom apartment (Matt, to Julie's relief, now shared a working studio with a friend, so most of his painting supplies didn't littler the apartment). The baby began banging his bottle and scattering cheerios to the floor. Matt walked to the counter and picked up the cell phone. It wasn't playing any special ring tone Julie recognized, so it must have been someone he didn't know well.

"Hello?"

Julie listened to his end of the conversation as she wrote. She was working on an article and normally would have tuned out his talking all together, but he sounded weird.

"What…hey. Hey. How are you? Are you calling from Guatemala? New York? When…how long have you been here? How did you get my number? How are you?"

Matt wasn't asking question after question, giving the mystery Guatemalan no time to answer. Julie stopped typing. The silence was sudden, because Matt was now quietly listening. She couldn't see his face, because he had his back to her, but she could imagine his expression from the tension in his posture. After listening for a long time, he muttered. "Oh…okay. Yeah, Saturday's fine. We can…discuss it. But, are you sure you have to go back to Guatemala so soon? I mean, is this the only time I'm ever going to see him?"

Julie had her chin against her hand now and was just staring at his back.

"Oh…okay. Yeah, noon is fine. Yeah, Lombardi's is fine. I know where that one is." When he had shut the phone and returned it to the countertop, he didn't turn around. He just kept standing there. He had one arm up, his forearm across his mouth.

"Who was that?" Julie asked. Her voice sounded far away from herself. "What did they want?"

Matt turned around slowly. The same look spread across his face that he'd had after she'd told him his dad had died.

"Matt, what's wrong?" She ran to him and put her arms around him. He leaned into her. In the high chair, Henry began to cry.

Julie slid away from her husband and went to tend to Henry. When she had him settled in his pack n' play in the corner of the living room where he usually slept, she came back to the kitchen. Matt was just sitting at the table, his shirt sleeves pulled over both his hands, staring numbly. She sat across the table from him, and he told her about the child he had fathered with Carlotta. Julie's lip trembled. Her eyelashes fluttered, but she didn't cry. "What does she want you to do about it now?"

Matt slid his hands out of his sleeves. He leaned forward and crossed his arms around himself, hugging himself. "She wants child support. She wants to work out some kind of private child support arrangement."

"How can you know it's really yours?"

"She said she'll have a paternity test done if I want."

"She doesn't want you in his life?"

"Nah…" Matt shook his head. "Nah, I mean, she didn't even tell me…he's like…four. I haven't heard from her since she went back to Guatemala. And she says she's going back home. She just wants me to help out as much as I can, work out some kind of private agreement…and she's taking him away." He looked like he was trying to swallow but couldn't. "She's gonna let me meet him once, tell him I'm some kind of friend, not his father, and then she's just gonna take him away. Take him back to Guatemala. I can't…I can't even…I can't do anything. I can't do anything but…the money." He chewed on his bottom lip and raised his eyes, just enough to look at her. "Julie?" he asked tentatively. "I'm sorry."

She studied the table as she spoke. They'd had their fights early in their marriage, but she'd learned to pause and find some way to calm herself. This was going to require a major pause. "I need some time," she said. "I'm going to Philadelphia tomorrow. You can watch Henry for the weekend. I'll come home on Monday. Please don't try to call me while I'm there."

"Julie – "

She looked up. Now the tears were forming in her eyes. "I don't want to be here when she...I just don't. And please don't call me. I need some time to think. I just need some time…We can talk when I come home. Just don't call me while I'm there."

She pushed her chair back from the table, ran to their bedroom, and closed the door. She locked it from the inside and threw herself on the bed, and only there, in private, did she let herself cry.

[***]

Julie raised her hand to knock on her parents' front door and hesitated. She had wanted nothing more than to run away from the shock, and she'd done the only thing she knew to do - she'd run home. Except it wasn't really home, was it? It was her parents' home, but it wasn't Dillon, and she wasn't a little girl anymore. It was true, what they said – you could never really go home again.

It was Gracie who opened the door, screaming, "Julie! Julie! Julie!" and jumping up and down. When Julie walked into the foyer she heard her dad slamming something into a cupboard in the kitchen and then his footsteps down the hallway. Julie had tried to call her mom to tell her she was coming, but her voicemail box had been full.

Her dad didn't seem at all surprised to see her. "Hey, Julie," he said softly, and hugged her tightly, and she sunk into his arms, like a child, not like the woman she was sure she had become. He pulled back, his hands on either of her shoulders, and examined her eyes. "How you doing?" he asked. She just nodded. "Where's Henry?"

"With Matt."

"I'll get your bag out of the car. Give me your keys."

While her dad was getting her stuff, Gracie insisted on showing Julie her latest Barbies. Julie made her best effort to smile and feign interest. As her dad came back into the house, he said, "I was gonna grill pork chops, but now that you're here, I'll just order vegetarian pizza instead. Your mom's gonna be late tonight. She had some kind of admissions emergency."

"Admissions emergency?" It was the first time Julie had laughed in hours.

Her father smiled. "Yeah. Something like that. I don't know. She's got an important meeting."

Later, after she and her dad and Gracie had eaten together, her dad told Gracie to get in PJs and turned on the TV for her. He invited Julie back to the kitchen, where he pulled out a single glass from below the built-in wine rack and poured himself some wine. It was weird seeing her father in this kitchen, standing before a wooden lattice filled with a dozen wine bottles. Her parents had saved up a lot more money over the years than she'd realized, and apparently Mom was raking in the big bucks now. Her father had always been a little tight – too bad they waited until she was out of the house to start spending their cash. Gracie would be growing up in a completely different world.

"Well, pour me a glass too please," she said. "Don't be rude."

"Julie, you're still not quite 21."

She'd gotten married, graduated a semester early from college, and given birth-but her Dad still thought of her as a kid. "It's perfectly legal for parents to give their own kids wine to drink in their own home," she said.

"It is?" He didn't seem quite to believe her, but he got out another glass. He only filled it about three ounces full. He extended her the glass.

"Sorry I just showed up unannounced," she said as she took it.

"It's a'ight. You know you're always welcome."

"Why don't you seem surprised? Did Matt call you? Did he mention Carlotta?"

"No. She showed up here looking for Matt. This was the address listed for him, but she couldn't just call, I think, because Mom and I don't list our phone numbers. Learned our lesson in Dillon."

"Did she have a kid with her?"

He nodded and sat down at the kitchen table, and she followed.

"Did…did he look like Matt?"

He refused to look at her. "Yeah. A lot."

Julie took a small sip of her wine. She put it back on the table. Her dad still wasn't looking at her. "I can't...I just can't…" she said, and now she was the one to look away. "I told him not to call me here. I'm going back home Monday. He's meeting with her Saturday. That's why I didn't want to be there."

Her father leaned forward in his chair. She knew because she could hear it creak and shift. "Hey, Monkey Noodle…"

Monkey Noodle? He hadn't called her that in a long time. She looked at him instinctively and laughed.

He smiled weakly at her. "Hey," he continued softly, "I know you're upset. I understand that. And you're always welcome here. Know that. But you can't…you can't just run home every time you and Matt have problems. And you can't not talk to him for three days straight. That's gonna be agonizing for him."

Some nerve her father had. He was siding with Matt? Because he was a guy?

"When we got married," her dad continued, "your mom and I agreed not to go to bed angry with each other. Most of the time we've stuck to it. You can't resolve everything in one day all the time, but before the sun sets, we try to be reconciled at least to the point where it's clear that even if we're upset, we're committed to each other. What I'm trying to say is, if you just up and leave for three days and don't talk to Matt, he doesn't know. He doesn't know it's going to be okay. That eventually it's going to be okay."

"I don't know that!"

"You're married now, Julie. You aren't just dating anymore. You've got to know that." He sighed. "That's the one thing you've got to always know."

"Are you taking his side?"

"Damn, Julie. I'm not taking anyone's side. I want you two to be happy. But imagine how you'd feel if he just up and left for days…"

She laughed bitterly. "Yeah, well, he did that while we were dating, and it was a heck of a lot more than three days before he called me, and I hadn't done anything at all."

"Yeah, well, that sucked didn't it? And like I said – you aren't dating anymore. You're a married woman. Even more to the point – you two have a child together."

Yeah, Julie thought. They had ONE of his two children together. "I didn't come here for a lecture," she told him. "I came here…I guess I was an idiot…I came here for comfort."

"I love you, Julie babe, and you can always come here. Always. And I'm always going to love you, no matter what happens with you and Matt. You're my daughter. But it's because I love you that I'm telling you all this." He stood and reached for her wine glass, took it, and walked over to the sink several feet away on the other side of a counter. He poured the remaining two ounces down the drain. "I think I hear your mom's car pulling up."

Julie heard her father walk from the kitchen, but she wasn't looking at him. She was turning her rings back and forth on her finger. The diamond on her engagement ring caught the overhead light from the kitchen and reflected it onto the hood that covered the top of the stove. She could see the grease stains, dark and ugly, in the streaks of light.