When Lucy asked her, "are you sitting down, Mom?" Ava immediately felt the temperature rise. Her cheeks were instantly hot and clammy. Hot flashes seemed to be her new response to any emotion. Miss a deadline? Hot flash. Husband prefers to sleep in the guest room? Hot flash. See your muffin top hang over your pants? That was crying followed by a hot flash. Ava hoped that her daughter was just being the overly dramatic teenage girl that she had a tendency to be instead of the harbinger of actual bad news.
"Now I am," she mumbled in the phone as she collapsed into the dining room chair.
"Okay, I think I'm freaking out," Lucy started but she often began conversations like that. "There's a woman on Facebook who says she's my sister."
Oh god, it was so much worse than the muffin top.
Lucy continued, "I said no way because I'm an only child. But she's adopted." There was silence and Ava realized that her daughter deserved an explanation but even after twenty six years, she still wasn't able to come up with one. "Mom?" Lucy prompted her, "that's not true, is it?"
Ava felt the sweat drip down the back of her neck and trickle into her blouse. Great, she'd have to change before her meeting, that was if she could move from the chair. She felt frozen in place as the years peeled back to remind her of her first daughter; the secret daughter.
Had it really been that long and didn't that make Ava old? She had wanted to tell Lucy a hundred times, maybe a thousand but Doug always said it was inappropriate. He had said that his daughter, emphasis on the "his", shouldn't have to hear about her mistakes. Her husband always made "mistakes" plural, as if she'd run slipshod through life until meeting Doug; as if he'd been the one to finally straighten her out. When he got all high and mighty like that, Ava couldn't even look at him let alone talk to him.
"Mom?" Lucy waited, her pitch had already gone up a notch or two. In a moment, it would become an alarm.
"Yes honey," Ava said calmly, as if this were nothing, a speed bump, something almost entirely expected. "It's fine. What does she want?" Ava would have congratulated herself on artfully dodging the question if it didn't include lying to her daughter, the one that she sometimes, in her head and never out loud, referred to as her "real" daughter.
Lucy sniffed and mumbled, "She wanted to talk to you. Maybe she's just a scammer, Mom." Lucy sounded hopeful, like something nefarious was a much better solution than the simple truth.
Her mother was a liar.
Actually her father was too but Doug would never take responsibility for his suggestion. Ava propped her damp forehead up with one hand and clicked a pen with the other. "Did she give you a phone number?" Ava asked. She refused to do anything like this on social media. She had signed a form that day in the hospital that said she wanted the records to be sealed. It was supposed to be private but she supposed nothing was really private anymore. If she started on her diatribe about these kids that revealed their deepest, darkest secrets to the whole world on the internet because they weren't really old enough to have any deep, dark secrets, she'd never get this over with.
Lucy gave her the phone number and Ava thanked her and promised, "I'll sort this out," before she hung up. She'd managed to put it off again but that didn't make her feel anything more than shame.
Once she'd pressed the red end call button, Ava took a deep breath and felt herself melt into the chair. What to do, her mind swam with the possibilities and the best idea so far was to open a bottle of wine and drink about half in spite of the fact that it wasn't quite ten o'clock in the morning. Drunk before lunch wasn't something that Ava Conley did. Ava Conley had a polite cocktail at lunch occasionally. Ava Conley would say it was European to do so. Ava Conley kept her drinking to wine and to the dinner hour and felt it was impolite to down more than a bottle by herself at any one time, usually.
She hadn't been drunk early in the day since she was Ava Fleiss and back then day drinking hadn't affected her at all because she'd been drunk in love.
Jeff Schultz, his name was similar to a magic word, like abracadabra. She thought that he'd finally stopped haunting her back when Lucy was about six years old. It was then that she'd stopped driving by his house and she secretly congratulated herself on the restraint that she'd shown. If she had been honest, it was only because her daughter had started to pay attention to directions and asked questions.
Doug had known that the breakup had been hard, that's what Ava had told him. He hadn't known, had never known, that depending on what day it was, Ava might say she was still in love with him.
After thirty minutes of staring at nothing, Ava called to cancel the meeting. She could hardly go like this, her blonde bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat. Even her mascara was ruined, not from tears, from sweat. No, she hadn't cried and Ava didn't think she ever would. Not any more, she was empty.
Thirty minutes after that; on the second tumbler of wine she realized, no, that was wrong. Actually Ava was full. She was full to overflowing because she'd never really properly had the breakup conversation. He'd never sat across the table from her and looked down and held her hand with both of his own, afraid to let go because it might just be the last time.
It was the perfect time to call him.
Ava had only had to wait 26 years for the perfect excuse to hear his voice. It alarmed her how easy it was for her to dial his number after all this time, as if the memory were actually contained in her fingers rather than her mind. She should have known, Ava reminded herself as the phone rang, her body had never forgotten him.
"Hello?" he answered. Jeff answered with a question, as if her long lost love were incredulous that she'd finally called back, like he'd been waiting for it.
Jesus, what if he didn't remember her? Ava could hardly breathe as she announced herself, "It's Ava Conley. Is this Jeff?"
"Ava!" he sounded thrilled to hear her voice, "Conley?" he sounded as if he were trying to figure out what man had given his old lover his last name. "So little Ava Fleiss is all grown up? I don't believe it."
She snorted and then covered her face with her hand. Thank god they were only speaking on the phone. After all this time and the sexiest thing she can come up with is a snort? If he could only see her as she dripped, the wet stains on her blouse, the slickness around her muffin top. It wasn't something that a young, terribly sexy Ava Fleiss would have done. "Believe it," she spoke just above a whisper; not only was she all grown up but smack dab in the middle of menopause. "How are you?" Ava asked, she pictured the Jeff that she remembered. Perhaps he sat at his own dining room table.
All this time, he was just across town but a whole universe away.
"Great!" he responded and with a curled lip Ava thought to herself that he probably was. He had probably been great the whole fucking time. It had probably been water off a duck's back for him. He'd just gone home that night and ate tuna casserole with his wife and kids and probably let out a sigh of relief about dodging that bullet.
While Ava had gone home and was still pregnant with her married lover's baby.
Jeff chuckled and Ava swore it was still the same naughty, suggestive laugh that got her to do so many naked things with him a lifetime ago. "I bet I know why you're calling," he said in that voice that had paged through her secrets, like he was reading her diary. All wise, all powerful Jeff, the man who had found her clitoris one afternoon and Ava had been under his spell ever since.
"Do you?" Ava suddenly felt like a gullible twenty something once again. She had been just a girl who fell for the whole package, quickly. His dark hair was curly and thick in her fingers. His chocolate brown eyes were rich, expressive puddles that shimmered when he laughed. His dimples, fuck his dimples that she'd kissed so many times.
Ava felt undeniably warm again but this was the heat between her legs.
"Our daughter," he said it like it wasn't monumental. Almost like bastard children came crawling out of the woodwork all the time. Ava rolled her eyes, most likely she wasn't the only secretary that Jeff had fucked. But he hadn't just fucked her, had he? "Chelsea had DNA testing done and they also check your genealogy. I guess one of my sisters thought her father was really the mailman or something and here we are."
Ava was late to the party but she'd always been two steps behind Jeff. "Her name is Chelsea?"
"Yeah, Chelsea Peters. Quite the looker I might add," he dropped his voice, this was for her ears only and Ava wondered if he were home alone. "We make good looking kids."
Ava opened her mouth but nothing came out. No words would form and she'd never been really good at communicating with him that way. They were much better at ripping each other's clothes off. They had been remarkable at expressing themselves with fingers and moans and sighs and sweat. At some point, her body was covered in sweat, his and hers and she couldn't get enough. It was sweat and cum and maybe even tears, it was their own wine and she loved smelling Jeff on her skin all night.
She'd smell it and masturbate to it
