Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [96]
“Sam told me,” Charlie said. “What’s this all about, Ariel?”
Was his voice quivering? What was the protocol?
“I guess those posters are a little confusing, Uncle Charles.” She who never addressed him by his proper name.
“You’re right about that.”
“Does Aunt Bonnie know?”
“I told Sam to keep his mouth shut. Apparently she hasn’t seen anything. But my question is, again, what’s going on?”
Just say it. “Brice is my stepfather.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Brice isn’t my birth father. Kip is.”
A silence, then, “How come you never told us?”
Protocol, once more, decorum. How crazy was it that these conventions, meant to sustain social order, as often as not skewed things between people? Again, though, Ariel had always imagined this revelation to be Brice’s sole prerogative and she’d followed his continued silence in the matter with what now appeared to her to be an unmanageable devotion. The truth was out now. She realized, for better or worse, it was as much her truth as anyone else’s. Speak, say something. “I only found out myself a few years ago.”
“So you’re telling me Kip Calder’s your father?”
“Biologically, is all.”
“Is all?”
Charlie had other questions but ceased asking. Perhaps Bonnie Jean hadn’t been so wrong about Brice all these years. Obviously he did have a screw loose in the ethics department. “Sam and I can only play dumb for so long, and Bonnie’s bound to find out sometime. Why not tell her, Ariel? She’d appreciate the gesture, and besides, your aunt loves you a little more than I think you give her credit for.”
Everything had become about articulation, had it not. Ariel’d never heard her uncle speak more thoughtfully, cogently. She agreed to his gentle request. “She’s probably over at the center, isn’t she.”
“Where else?”
“I’m going now,” Ariel said.
“Just tell her, that’s all.”
“Thanks, Uncle Charles.”
“Please. Charlie.”
“Thanks, Uncle Charlie.”
During the drive over, Ariel composed her words to Bonnie Jean but found herself much more concerned with how her grandmother would react—presuming, that is, she should be apprised at all. Why hadn’t she gone around and taken down those stupid posters after she decided to abandon the hunt? The apostate at work again? Backsliding away from her firm decision because some hope of finding him still lived in her? It was true, regarding matters still living, that she hadn’t taken any steps to arrange the abortion, either. What was she doing?
She’d closely followed her grandmother McCarthy’s recovery, its daily routines and subtle victories. With Ariel at her side, the woman now pushed her walker down the center’s linoleum corridors, greeting those she had gotten to know a little, and then out into the stone-enclosed garden, where she might sit and proselytize for Christ, preacher to the choir. She glowed with renewed life. Ariel had splurged on a silk robe for her, bright blue with white piping to match her blue leather slippers. Bonnie did her hair and painted her nails. Her appetite, never ravenous, grew day by day. Applesauce and rice pudding had graduated to gravied chicken with hot biscuits. She could read for herself but still loved to hear Ariel’s voice, so feigned eye strain—they both knew it was a ruse—to prompt her granddaughter, whose delivery was as impassioned as if she’d written the words herself. Oddly, Granna had not mentioned Brice in all this time. Had she forgotten him in some neuropathway fracture? She’d initially struggled in speech therapy with simple words like fish and foot while recognizing, uttering, and defining