CLIMBING THE FAMILY TREE, CHAPTER TWO
When Cindy found her biological father, she and he experienced something very common among people who meet their biological parent of the opposite sex for the first time as adults:
Instant sexual chemistry and instant sexual attraction.
Cindy did not tell her husband, that loyal, high-earning dentist, that she was going to start looking for her biological father. Cindy had already told her husband so many lies and half-truths about what had happened when she went to Parador to visit her biological mother. It was easier to tell him that the entire experience had been such a rush (an absolutely true statement) that she was going to let the excitement and the new energy of having met her biological mother settle back down (a half-truth) before doing any more climbing of the family tree.
While it was true that after having seen up-close how her mother lived in Parador, on her mountain-top goat-farm, and having become intimately familiar with her mother's community, Cindy knew, for her own sanity, that she needed to let all that energy settle back down, far away, in a distant latitude. However, what was not true about what Cindy told her husband, was that the feeling of being there, face to face, breathing the same air as her own birth mother, was such a high, such a rush of amazing, big, birth-parent energy, that Cindy knew she had to repeat it, and soon. And her unknown birth-father was Cindy's best shot.
Plus, Cindy's mother had given her a clue: she had heard from one of her Stateside friends, a woman whom she had known since long-ago, from back in those times when Cindy's mom was a loving young woman with a baby on the way and no ring on her finger; but that old friend told Cindy's mom recently that the man who had knocked Cindy's mother up with Cindy--a then-young, then-married man who had a passionate affair one summer with the young but legal clerk in his office (Cindy's birth-mom)--was still alive and living not too far from where he and Cindy's mother met, loved, and made life (Cindy), sent out into the world in a bushel of reeds, now returned to find them both.
Cindy did not tell her husband about those new clues to her biological father's existence, such as his name and location, that Cindy's birth-mother was able and enthusiastic to provide.
Nor did Cindy tell her husband, whom she dutifully and enthusiastically (seeming) did fuck immediately upon returning home from her trip to visit her mother in Parador. And whom Cindy kept fucking with regularity enough to make her absolutely above any suspicion by him, not that the happy-go-lucky and work-obsessed dentist suspected her of anything at all beyond being a happy wife. He was sure she was happy to fuck only as frequently as he wanted to and only in the ways that he wanted to. He was a confidant man, on the top of his game, professionally. But she did not tell him, that, from their first returning and reuniting fuck and through every subsequent fuck back in their marital bed in their marital home, she did not tell him that it felt... different.
What felt different? He felt different. The way she felt him when she felt him when he fucked her, or, when she let him fuck her, he felt different to her. The reason for this, she thought, was that she had been still sore when she came home to him.
When she fucked her husband that first night back after he picked her up at the airport, she was still sore, and she still hurt, but she could not let him know that. So she gave herself to him and seemed as glad to see him as he was to see her.
But she still was sore in places and it was okay, pain-wise, because when Cindy and her husband fucked that reunion night, she could feel that he was not touching her in those places where she was sore, where she still ached from how she had been stretched and pounded.
When her husband made those sounds he makes and came in her, Cindy caught herself--her mind was millions of miles away--well, thousands of miles away, in Parador, but there she was, naked atop her naked husband and his cum was dribbling out of her.
Welcome back Stateside honey.
Welcome back, indeed.
So Cindy put it off and Cindy tried to be the dutiful and loving housewife again.
She tried. But, in a matter of weeks, she decided to try other things, instead.
That big, birth-parent energy.
Cindy went to the local library and did the searches on the library's icky free computers, so that there would be no record on any of her home devices.
A landscaping company bearing his name. Oh, my. Oh, my!
She got a new, cheap phone, a burner phone, which she kept hidden in a makeup bag. She memorized the number almost immediately. She was dying to use it.
When her husband took her body for a maintenance missionary ride on a weeknight, it was those ten digits in her mind, that she repeated over and over, matching each thrust and then closing her eyes and seeing that secret telephone number over and over again, like winning lottery numbers while her husband hit his simple pleasure-release inside her.
Jackpot.
Her birth mother was right.
Her birth father was a two-hour drive away, conveniently located at the same highway exit as the largest, closest outlet malls.
It was as if he moved there knowing what perfect cover it was, Cindy thought to herself. She loved that outlet mall, in particular. She wondered if she had ever seen him there when she took her daughter back-to-school shopping.
Her husband did not even hear her when she mumbled something about going outlet shopping that day, while he was busy in his morning shower-shave-out-the-doorness. He gave her a "sure, have fun," and a kiss, and Cindy's heart did flips and her lungs stopped working for a moment.
But once he was gone and the kids were at school, she could breathe again.
A fresh state road went direct to the outlet malls. Two lanes in each direction, divided. Cindy's present last year for being such a good housewife to such a successful dentist was a red two-seater Lexus. The kids called it "Mom's Car," but Cindy never thought of it by that name.
At all. Ever.
But she was a good mother, so when they do call it Mom's Car, she smiles and moves the conversation along. Nags, if necessary.
To Cindy, the car was Red, and she and Red did more and more things together, now that she did not have the kids to ferry around all the time in the SUV. Big Grey, Cindy called it, but only to herself.
But, now, trips to the spa, trips to yoga, trips to massage therapy, trips to cut-and-color appointments where the co-eds had theirs done: Cindy took those trips in Red. Including the trips to cosmetologists where she and the co-eds fought back tears while some of the sweetest aestheticians she had ever met caused her pains not even felt during childbirth.
But even when her husband took her for granted, took her perfectly pristine, waxed pussy for merely satisfactory, Cindy knew Red always knew how good she looked.
Well, still looked.
"Who are you kidding, you look better than ever, especially after Parador," her inner voice, which she attributed to her sportscar because it was her inner-voice of pure confidence and satisfaction, told her as she wound over those low, southern hills.
She and Red drove fast everywhere these days, but they especially drove fast to the outlet malls.
A two hour trip?
They made it in ninety minutes.
And then... no plan at all. Drive around, look for a landscaping truck? Yes, that felt totally sensible. Red agreed. Three-quarters of a tank of gas. Lovely weather to cruise around the exurbs like you're a successful housewife thinking of moving her family further out, someplace even more... private.
Private. Yes, Cindy thought. Away from prying small-town eyes.
Cindy drove around lazily for two hours, getting a feel for the layout of the remote southern town where the outlets had been built.
Red's convertible top down, perfect country day exurban air blowing through Cindy's long hair.
Her rack just happening to look just amazing in this just-so-casual top and outfit she just-so-casually plotted out in her mind during so many trips to and from the Organic Grocery Chain.
She eventually found the county buildings, huddled together near the interstate, that passed for the town's square. All of the county's services were there, fire, police, ambulance response, and the town itself was listed as unincorporated. A region that had once been nothing but poor farms on weak, swampy land, surrounded by a whole lot of wilderness, had been transformed. Thanks to the interstate going one way, and now this state road going the other, there was prosperity out of swamps and for that prosperity, the guardians to take their cut.
The cluster of county services buildings, all hailing from when the outlet mall first went in twenty years ago, led Cindy through access roads to the other, newer proof the exurb's non-retail commercial wealth.
Cindy, in an exploratory mode, took Red for lazy loops around the impeccably-landscaped corporate center behind the county buildings, pristinely curated and manicured complexes of anonymous modernist boxes, surrounded by ample parking with many shade trees.
The office complex gave way to more retail-level white-collar businesses. There were a series of medical offices. An investment counselor. A home-loan company with a friendly name. And then, in a corner of this larger development, taking up its own square of the development... with most of that a considerably large, fenced-in yard, a functional main building, connected to a greenhouse and more mixed indoor-outdoor space... a parking lot full of heavy-duty Silverados with matching side-logos, it was an obviously outdoorsy business...that had her biological father's last name on it.
The sign above the door of the main building.
The name on the logos of the trucks.
Whose's landscaping company did those logos say those trucks belonged to?
Her Daddy's landscaping company.
Cindy felt a rush of terror and joy at once, in every joint of her body.
His name, his property, Cindy thought.
You don't have his name, but you know you're his property, Red thought.
Hush, Cindy told Red in her mind. Oh you hush.
Cindy wanted to park and go inside. But, she thought, if she went in, and if the people there knew her father well and if they saw a strong resemblance but had never met her before or heard of her before... she could not cause a scandal as her way of introduction.
No.
She had to be patient.
So, she parked in one of the parking lots nearby, where she could observe the cars in the landscaping company's parking lot.
Her Daddy's landscaping company's parking lot.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god why are we doing this?
In Cindy's mind, Red just smiled.
She turned off her engine and rolled her windows up, closed her convertible roof. In this day and age, she could merely be a rich housewife, parking while talking on her cell phone. How much nicer to be parked and having a phone conversation than doing so while driving, as so many people seemed to do in this day and age, as well. Cindy was highly critical of distracted drivers.
Once she felt safe in her make-shift observation post, Cindy felt calm and peaceful.
Watching and waiting, and the longer she watched and waited the more she could dream about all the different possibilities. All the things that could come. That would come.
