I woke up the next morning to the sound of yelling coming from the living room. I slipped out of bed, grabbed my shirt and shorts from the floor where I had dropped them and slipped them back on. I exited the room and lucky for me, due to the way the house is set up, no one could tell which room I came from, since my room is right next to mom's. I walked into the living room to see mom, Aunt Roxy and my grandparents Dora and Victor staring down two people I had never seen before. I realized right away that they must be James and Sharon, my birth parents. I came in the middle of my mother yelling at them.
"... have no reason to be here!" Mom yelled.
"I just thought--" James (I couldn't think of this man as my father) started to say.
"What?" I asked, and everyone turned to look at me, "What did you think? That I would come running with a smile on my face saying 'Daddy'? I don't even know you."
James and Sharon looked at me with shock before Sharon (just like I couldn't think of James as my father, I couldn't think of Sharon as my mother) took a tentative step forward raising her arms as if to hug me. "Ricky..."
"His name is Andrew." mom hissed, and Sharon's face fell and she backed up a step.
"You changed my son's name?" She asked.
"HE'S NOT YOUR SON!" Mom and grandma yelled at her simultaneously.
"Yes, I legally changed his name," mom said, "That's my right as his mother. I've always liked that name, so I changed it when I adopted him. One less thing tying him to you."
"Don't act like you care now, after all this time." I said.
"Do you realize what you put us, all of us, through?" grandma asked, "I thought you were dead!"
"That can still be arranged," Aunt Roxy said, cracking her knuckles.
"No Roxanne," grandma said, "I want to hear him out. So tell me James, why did you abandon my grandson?"
"We realized we weren't ready..." James said.
"Oh bullshit!" Grandma said, "You had nine months to get ready. If you needed any advice or help all you had to do was ask me or Victor. We raised two children."
I had never heard my grandmother curse before, but I knew that she had a built in bullshit detector. I learned early on that lying to her was not a good idea, she always knew when I was trying to pull a fast one on her and she never let me get away with it.
"Although I'm trying to figure out where we went wrong with you." my grandfather said.
"You weren't ready?" mom asked. "You think I was?! You could have asked mom, or bought one of a million books written on how to raise a child, or looked up information online. That's what I did!"
"You know all those parental bonding things we were supposed to do?" I asked James and Sharon. "They did it. Grandpa taught me how to play sports and ride a bike, grandma taught me how to cook, Aunt Roxy taught me how to drive. And mom..."
I saw Sharon's face fall when I called Janet my mother. I put an arm around mom's shoulder.
"...she did everything else. She taught me right from wrong. She comforted me when I needed it, she supported me, she was there for me through the good times and the bad. When I felt like the world was going to shit, I turned to her and she made it all better. She succeeded where you failed. These four people did everything you were supposed to do. They gave me the love and attention that I needed to thrive and grow. I owe EVERYTHING I am to them. As for you, I didn't even know you existed until two days ago. And looking at you I just realized I don't look anything like either one of you, if anything I look more like grandpa."
It was true. I had more of my grandfather's facial features than I did of the man standing before me. In fact when I was a kid, especially between 9 and 13 years old, I was almost the spitting image of my grandfather. About the only thing I had in common with the two people standing before me was eye color, and even that was passed down from grandpa.
"I think the real question is why are you here James?" grandpa asked. The fact that he used James' name and didn't refer to him as his son seemed to hurt James. In fact, no one in the room had once referred to James by their relationship to him. They just called him by his name. I could tell just by the look on his face that hurt him a lot. I couldn't find it in myself to feel sorry for him.
"Yeah, why are you here?" Aunt Roxy asked, "Did you think you could make up for the last 18 years with a simple 'I'm sorry'? Because I think you know, that's not going to cut it. The only reason I haven't called the cops is because Dora told me not to, at least not yet. Do you realize how much shit you're in? You could be fined thousands of dollars, possibly even thrown in jail. Please Dora, let me call them."
"Not so fast, Roxy," mom said, "I want to know too."
All eyes were on the two people that gave birth to me. The sperm donor and the incubator as Aunt Roxy called them.
"We felt really bad about what we did," James said, "And we wanted a chance to come back and make things right. We wanted to see Ric -- I mean Andrew now that he's all grown up. We realized we made a huge mistake, and we wanted to see if there was any way to make things up to our son."
"It took you 18 goddamn years to figure that out?" mom asked. "And I told you before, he's not your son. He's mine! I'm the one who was left to raise him after you ran off to wherever the fuck you ran off to! I made huge sacrifices when I took him in! My boss understood the situation I was in and allowed me to spend more time at home by reducing my workload without cutting my pay. He even let me work from home for the first couple of years."
"Oh, and I also found out about how unhappy you were when you found out you were pregnant," I said, specifically to Sharon, "Makes me wonder why you had me if you were so unhappy with the prospect of motherhood. I'm thinking it may have been your idea to run off and not his."
It looked like I hit the nail on the head, she couldn't even look at me.
"Everyone was so happy when they found out I was pregnant," she said, starting to cry, but I didn't buy it, and I don't think anyone else did either. "I felt obligated to have you. But I realized I didn't have it in me to be a mother, I wouldn't be able to properly provide for you, so I talked James into dropping you off with your aunt and just taking off. I figured you'd be better off without us, but I also knew everyone would be mad at us, so after he dropped you off, we went to the bank, cleaned out our accounts and we left town."
"And you went along with it you stupid son-of-a-bitch," Aunt Roxy said, then turned to grandma, "No offense Dora."