That’s why he didn’t tell me. He wanted me to be upset. If he’d told me my mother worked for the CIA, I might have let her off the hook. Possibly even been proud of her. Yeah, my mom walked out on me, but she’s out there saving the world, so it’s okay.

But my dad was right. It wasn’t okay.

I change directions. “How did you find out? Did she tell you?”

“You were two years old,” he says after a long second. “She’d just returned from a trip. I, of course, thought she was on assignment with Global Geologist somewhere in Northern Africa.”

I ask, “Did she call you when she went away on these trips?”

“You need to understand, this was the early eighties, and it wasn’t like people had cell phones. Her projects were always in some rural, hard-to-reach place. She would call whenever she could, which was about once a week. Usually just a quick hello. Give Henry a kiss for me. Can’t wait to see you.”

The thought of my mother sending me a kiss over the phone thirty-odd years ago is a mental sour-patch kid. Sweet then sour.

“Keep going,” I say.

“She’d just gotten back. You were up, crawling around the place like a crazy man. She and I were on the couch. You somehow got into her purse and started pulling everything out. And I mean everything: wallet, lipstick, compact, change purse, hairbrush, passport.”

“Your mom’s passport picture was hilarious,” he says with a mini-laugh. “She looked stoned, eyes half open, hair a mess, and I loved teasing her about it. I flipped it open and stopped cold. At first, I thought she was so sick of me making fun of her picture that she got a new picture taken without telling me. But then I looked at the name. I still remember it to this day: Rebecca Hulgev.”

I write the name down on the top of the legal pad and ask, “How did she explain that?”

“She didn’t. She told me straight off that she worked for the CIA.”

“And you believed her?”

“I didn’t know what to believe. Then she showed me a small safe she had hidden in the basement. It was just like in the movies. Five different passports. A bunch of money from different countries. And a gun.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yep.”

“Did she tell you anything else?”

“That’s it. She said she couldn’t tell me anything else. Made me promise never to tell anyone, not even you. She said she would tell you when the time was right.”

“And you were okay with this?”

“What was I going to do? It was her job.”

“But she lied to you. All that time.”