BooksBarbecue
Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I spend the next three minutes speed-talking. Once I finish, there is only silence. “Dad?”

“I’m here.”

“Did you know?”

“No.”

“But that would explain everything: her weird schedule, the extended trips, her walking out on us. Do you think it’s true? Do you think mom could have been a terrorist?”

He is silent. I imagine him scanning nine years of marriage, looking for red flags.

A silence follows.

Three seconds become eight.

Eight become eleven.

Lassie glances up at me.

My nostrils flare.

“Lassie!” I push him off. “Dude, take that outside.”

It smells like three-week-old curry.

“What did Lassie do?” my dad asks.

I transition into the end of my yesterday. My falling, Ingrid taking care of me, Lassie eating the leftovers and his insides turning rotten.

“She’s a good one, that Ingrid. You keep hold of her.”

I wonder if my father’s words have anything to do with my mother. Did he plan to hold onto her but couldn’t? And what about me? What if I found out Ingrid had secrets? Deep dark secrets. Would I be able to look past them?

“I plan to,” I say, then quickly add, “You never answered my question. Do you think mom could have been a terrorist?”

“No, your mom could not have been a terrorist.”

The conviction in his voice surprises me.

“And what makes you so sure of that. How would you know?”

“Because your mother worked for the CIA.” He pauses. “She was a spy.”

:05

I wait for my father to start laughing. To tell me that he got me good. That he’s pulling my leg.

But he’s not.

“Mom was a spy?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, if you knew this, then why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I promised her I wouldn’t.”

“So what? That was thirty years ago. You could have told me. You should have told me.”

“Sorry, son, but there is no statute of limitations on a promise.”

If there is one thing I have never questioned about my father, it is his integrity. But that he chose my mother over me pisses me off. I push the phone hard against the side of my face, a Samsung Galaxy sized impression on my cheek.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” I say, my voice heating. “This whole time I thought she left us because of me. If she worked for the CIA, then it’s different. Maybe she left because she had to go do, well, spy stuff, and not because her son was this sad little rent-a-kid.”

“It doesn’t matter what her job was, geologist, spy, astronaut. She chose it over you. She still walked out on us. She should have chosen you.”

I ease the pressure of the phone off my ear.