Doris winced. “Let me guess. The town turned on you as a harlot and a she-devil, while the guy gets off free and easy.”
“Got it in one. I confided in the head waitress, who I’d thought was a friend. I’d certainly taken enough extra shifts for her, and covered for her in other ways. But I’d missed the signals that she was hot for Rigo, and he’d just been polite to her. He was to all the women, except me. She must have burned a trail to the owner, because by the end of the week everyone in town knew. The diner fired my harlot ass.”
Bird scowled.
“But I was not about to put up with being treated like the town Jezebel, so I took my skimpy savings and got a bus ticket as far north as I could. There’s no use going into the deets. It was easy enough to get waitress work in those days, so I did, and when I started showing, I lied and said my husband was in the Korean War but I hadn’t heard from him in months.”
“Those were the days when hardly anyone had a phone,” Doris said, shaking her head. “I remember once my great-grandmother remarking tartly that a gal who needed to get lost could get lost. Though I never found out the story behind that.”
“Too bad. I would have liked to hear it. As for me, I certainly did. And so, my boy was born.”
Bird and Doris exclaimed almost in unison, “You have a son?”
“I do. Still do—I believe, though I’ve got no proof. That part is coming. When Alejandro was small he and I were mostly in boarding houses, with one phone in the hallway, everyone listening to whoever was talking. We moved a lot. There were some nosy types who seemed to think it was their duty to question Alejo about where his dad was. If he had a dad. Or I’d get the stink eye from holier-than-thous who didn’t believe in the husband in Korea.”
“I remember those days,” Doris sighed.
Bird nodded as Godiva went on, “Not that I cared what anybody thought, but I was not going to put up with Alejandro getting crap for having a single mom. So we’d move again, and I’d change my name. After three of those in a row, I rented a post box, and told him if we ever got separated, we’d write to that post box, and then find each other.”
“Now that was smart,” Eve said.
“But. Maybe it was the Nosy Parkers, or maybe peer stuff. Or maybe something boys just do, when they hit a certain age, because Alejandro kept asking about his dad. When he was little he believed me when I said his dad was a soldier overseas, but when he reached sixteen or so, suddenly he was all over me about who his dad was, where he was, and the rest of it.”
Doris the teacher and Bird the mother both nodded.
“I always told Alejandro the truth—that we’d been abandoned, that his dad was a worthless skunk, and anyway I had no idea where he was now. I didn’t even know his last name! I’d known him as Rigo El Cabarello, which was the name he rode under. I thought telling Alejo he was a skunk would disgust him into dropping it. But the day after he finished his junior year in high school, I came back from working a late shift one night to find him gone, with a note on his pillow: he’d taken off to find his dad, and promised to write to me as soon as he found him.”
“Oh, no,” Bird whispered.
“I reported him to the police as a missing person, just to get sneered at. Every single day or night, after I finished my shift—sometimes before and after—I walked that town for hours, looking for him. I went to all the places I knew he and his friends hung out. I checked the post office box at least three times a week. This went on until mid-July. It felt like forever, but it was probably a month and a half. I didn’t dare move away. I kept expecting Alejo to turn up, and I didn’t want him to find strangers at that crappy boarding house. You remember, no internet in those days, no cell phones. Once you lost touch with someone, they were pretty much gone.”
“So he vanished?” Bird clasped her hands tightly.
“Well, yes and no. There came a day when I finally found a post card in the box. Posted from somewhere in the Dakotas. He’d found his dad—how, I will never know. No return address, since it was a post card. But the handwriting was definitely his. The message just said he was fine, and everything was groovy. Said he’d write again. And he did. I got a post card every few days, always from different places heading west, always saying he was having a great time traveling with his dad. The last one was from San Francisco.”
“Was he all right?” Bird asked, her eyes huge.
“He said he was having a blast. You know teenage boys. Not exactly forthcoming. That last post card was about watching guys painting the Golden Gate bridge, and wasn’t it a kick how once they get done they have to start all over again. And that was the last one.”
Godiva tipped her head toward her study. “I still have the post cards. Then nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. A year passed. He turned eighteen, and legally he could do what he wanted. But I still wanted to find him.”
Godiva shook her head. “After his birthday came and went and no message, I paid up on the box for ten years, and came out west to look for him. Since the last place I’d heard from him was San Francisco, that’s where I headed. Never found him, and I was broke. So I settled on the west coast to start over. Eventually made my way down here. But I kept writing to him at that post box, and every year I traveled back to check the box myself. After I got an agent, she checked it for me, as it was a short drive for her. Nothing. Ever again.”
Doris and Bird had exchanged glances a couple times. Doris said slowly, “Sounds like you were living hand to mouth there for quite a while.”
“That I was.”
“But somewhere in there you became a successful writer, about a private investigator. Did you ever think of hiring a real one to find your boy?”
“You betcher booty I did! My very first royalty check, before I even moved out of Cockroach Central, the dump of an apartment I was living in at the time. Nada. I tried again when computers became a thing, and I thought surely it would be easier—how many Alejandro Cordovas can there be in the country? Thousands, I guess, because that try, too, was a bust. I even tried to find Rigo, except that I never had learned his last name, and ‘Rigo El Caballero’ didn’t get any traction whatsoever. So I just continued to write to Alejo every year, birthday and Christmas, always with my address and phone. So if he wants to find me, he can.” Godiva sighed. “And that’s my story. Or was, until Rigo turned up this morning.”
Bird said softly, “You didn’t ask him this morning about your son?”
“No. I took one look at Rigo’s handsome face—oh yes, he’s still hotter than a bonfire, damn him—and lost it.”
Bird said, “I know you haven’t asked what I think, but I’m going to say it anyway, speaking as one mother to another. Even if Rigo’s a total asshat, you ought to ask him, before you do anything else. Or you will always wonder.”
Godiva sighed sharply, not wanting to explain that she’d always known she would. But would he refuse to tell her? What if he didn’t know either? The thought of talking to Rigo hurt so much. All those old emotions had come rushing back, as if he’d dumped her yesterday. How could she explain that to Doris and Bird?