Page 34 of Choosing Us

We have some strong personalities and all tend to be competitive.

“That’s not it at all, son.” Dad claps me on my back as he nods to the dining room. He looks like shit. His eyes are bloodshot, and his hair is all out of place. It’s like he has aged ten years since I saw him last week. “We’re just waiting for Finn, and then we’ll get started.”

Like summoned by our father, the front door slams and Finn cries out, “I don’t know what happened, but I swear, it wasn’t me this time!”

Dad has a sad look on his face and nods to the dining room again. “Come on, grab a drink and take your seat.”

Jack and Liam are already seated when I enter the dining room, and I take my usual spot as I try to decode whatever secretive bullshit those two are up to. Dad starts dishing up pieces of pizza and passing it out, but I can’t eat until I know what the hell is going on. I refuse a plate and shake my head. “I’m good.”

“Come on, Ryan. Just take a plate,” Savannah pleads. I roll my eyes but take it and drop it in front of me.

“Okay, fine, we all have our pizza, now what the hell is going on? This is freaking me out, and I really hate that half of my siblings clearly already know what the fuck is going on.”

Liam huffs and looks up at the ceiling—which is exceptionally strange for my usually very controlled brother.

Dad raises his hand to interrupt Jack who was about to respond to my slight temper tantrum. “No, it’s okay, Jack. I’ve got this. It’s my fault we have to have this conversation, so I should take the blame.”

“What did you do?” Finn asks without preamble.

Savannah’s eyes fill with tears before she fills the silence. “It’s okay, Daddy. You didn’t know.”

Dad hums, and I am getting more pissed off by the second. “Will someone just tell us what happened? Or who died? Or who’s in trouble?” My voice is slightly louder than I intended, but I want whatever it is out in the open.

“It’s no secret that I wasn’t a perfect husband to your amazing mother,” Dad begins, but that’s not news.

Any façade I had about my father being the perfect husband came crashing down the summer when I was seventeen years old. The night before the Fourth of July, Mama received a phone call from a friend telling her she needed to come down to the town’s Irish pub, O’Dell’s. Mama went to discover our father was on the patio—with another woman sitting on his lap. She fetched her husband, and when they got home, she read him the riot act behind the chicken coop, so they didn’t wake any of us. That night was more like a match that lit the damn wildfire, though, and nothing was safe.

We would come to learn that the fact that Murphy Callahan cheated on his wife was one of the worst kept secrets in our small town, but no one had the guts to tell my mother. He had been stepping out on her for years, and I still don’t know if it was related to drinking or not, but he stopped drinking, promised to be better, and did the work. He and Mama attended individual counseling and couple counseling, as well as a few family counseling sessions. If it wasn’t hard enough to reconcile that our entire town knew what had been going on and no one said anything, it was topped off by hearing how the man I respected most in this world had made multiple mistakes over the years and betrayed our mother and our entire family.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Vivian’s soft voice interrupts my trip down memory lane. Mama’s been gone for five years, so it’s not like he would be cheating on her now, unless…

“Dad, did you meet someone?” I ask.

His eyebrows go up, and he pauses before he replies, “I did, but not like that.”

“It wouldn’t be cheating on her now, Daddy. Mama wouldn’t want you to be alone. It’s okay if you’re ready to start dating again,” Vivian adds, clearly following the same train of thought.

But Savannah, Jack, and Liam all look disgusted at that thought.

“I … I don’t even know how to say this. I’m sorry.” He looks to Jack and Liam, then Savannah.

“Maybe just start from the beginning,” Savannah offers.

Dad nods. “Okay, so the summer … uh … the summer everything came out was, what … twenty, twenty-one years ago?” He looks at Jack, who nods in response. “Right, so from that night on, I was faithful to your mother. I swear on everything that I value, I was from that day forward.”

He doesn’t have to plead his case; we saw the change in the man and in their marriage.

“Wait, so who did you meet?” I ask Dad but then look to my siblings.

“There are a lot of details that I still don’t have, but unbeknownst to me at the time—and I swear, I had no idea—the fall after that summer, a little girl was born.”

What. The. Fuck?

“And she has the same green eyes that I got from my mother, and the same vivid green that you have, Vivi.”

“Dad, what are you saying?” Finn asks.

“I’m saying that this morning, I was informed that I have … I have a daughter I was unaware of.”