She was probably the same age as my mother, perhaps in her late forties. But the similarity ended there. Cynthia Waterstonewas poised and groomed. Her hair fell in styled waves from her face, which was carefully made up. She had no wrinkles, and her face was blemish-free. But the way her face looked was unnatural, somehow. Plastic surgery, I thought.
“Thank you for meeting me,” she said and gave a tight smile. “I’m sure your weekends are very full, shopping for the baby.”
The waiter came and she told him to bring us scones and tea. She didn’t even ask what I wanted.
“Matthew was so secretive about the two of you!” She clasped her hands together and smiled, blinking a few times.
“I’m sure you understand, being his mother, I only want the best for him.”
“Of course.”
“You can imagine my shock when I heard he’d gotten himself mixed up in all of this!” She gave a delighted clap of the hands.
“What do you mean, mixed up?”
She leaned forward, as if we were two girlfriends sharing a secret. “Well, dear, you have no way of knowing if it’s Matthew’s child or not, do you?”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. “My sources tell me you were out with your boyfriend, Timothy Daxton, several times over that period. You were seen being very close and intimate. If I shared that information with Matthew, what do you think he would make of it?”
“You hired a PI to find dirt on me?” I asked incredulous.
“Of course not!” she waved my question away to show how silly I was being.
“All of this is so confusing! You falling pregnant unexpectedly, of course you don’t know who the father is!”
“What…”
But she interrupted me. “Of course, Matthew is thrilled, but then he would be, being an only child! He’d always wanted siblings and now you’ve gone and made his dream come true! And as a prospective father, he does measure up much better than an aspiring musician with a drug problem, doesn’t he?” she giggled as if she’d told a clever little joke.
I didn’t know what to say.
“You know, of course, that Matthew comes from money. What is the colloquial term for it among your generation?” She pretended to think, then said, “Oh yes! Loaded! Not only from the Waterstone side of the family, but from my side as well. I was the sole heir to the Coolidge-Weston estate, so there is that too.”
She smiled at me. “So, I was trying to think how much money I could offer you to go away and never contact Matthew again. I was thinking a hundred thousand dollars? But that sounds paltry, doesn’t it? And you would have to leave your mother, start all over in a new place. So, would two hundred and fifty thousand dollars do it? A quarter of a million?”
She smiled at me, and it looked like a friendly smile. It really did. But when I looked carefully at her face, I could see how the smile ended on her mouth. Her eyes, the same dark shade as Matthew’s, were not warm and inviting, as his were. Hers were cold and lifeless, like a muddy sort of quicksand, that wanted to swallow you and suck the life from you.
I got up slowly.
“We have a deal, yes?”
I turned around and walked out of the hotel, still unable to speak.
I knew that Cynthia Waterstone was a troubled woman, a person who had suffered great tragedy and unhappiness in her life. But I couldn’t fathom the way she had spoken to me just now. The friendly, convivial way she had said the most insulting, horrible things and tried to bribe me; to get me to leave the city where I lived, where my mother was, just to get me out of her life. Of course, a quarter of a million dollars was a lot, I hardly knew how to wrap my head around a number like that. I could probably live off that for the rest of my life. But what kind of life would that be? Would it even be worth living?
When I later told my mother what had happened, she was gobsmacked too.
“She must really hate the thought of you having Matthew’s baby,” she said.
“You think?” We laughed and laughed, tears running down my face and I was so glad she was there to make me see the absurdity of the situation. There had been something malicious about Matthew’s mother that I couldn’t quite shake, but my mother’s humorous take on the situation managed to take the sting out of it.
“I’ve been thinking,” my mother said. “Maybe it’s time I told you more about your real father.”
I sat up, all ears. For years, I’d been begging her for this information, and she always came up with an excuse not to tell me.
As if reading my mind, she said, “I had a conversation with Vic about it and he pointed out that maybe it was time. He’d be the grandfather after all,” she pulled up her shoulders.
Then she told me about how she met John Vickers, a music producer from Colorado, twenty-four years ago. He’d come up to New York to work on an album with a young musician collaborating with some local hip hop stars. On a night out with friends, he met my mother and they hit it off. He was in the city for only a few days, long enough to do a few takes and then he had to get back to his family in Denver. He’d told my mother all of this, how life as a young father was not what he signed up for, how the kids were cramping his style and his wife, now a nagging mom of two, was a far cry from the young singer he’d fallen for. My mother, a stunning young model, had secured a few good jobs and was quite taken with the older music producer, who she said, was awfully sexy and entertaining. She didn’t want to wreck his family, she said, she just wanted to have fun.