Angel and The Bad Boy Pt. 01

When you get a phone call on the private number that only a few people are supposed to have, and it's from a number that you don't recognize, the smart thing is to let it go to voice mail. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don't always do the smart thing, but when I choose to do something else, it's usually because something else seems more entertaining in the moment -- as I've said before, "what I wanted now". I can't say that's why I decided to answer the call from a number I didn't recognize. While I was bored with the spreadsheet I was examining, and pretty much anything would have been more entertaining in the moment, the truth is that I wasn't really thinking about any of that when I swiped up to take the call. Let this be a lesson to you, boys and girls. Don't cross the streams.

"Yes?" I said to the phone.

The voice was unfamiliar and male, past adolescence but not too far past it. "Um, hello, is this --" And that was when he said the name I was born under, instead of the one I've worked and lived under for more than two decades.

The silence with which I answered his query was every bit as semi-voluntary as accepting the call in the first place had been. I was that surprised to hear that name again after all this time.

"Hello?" the voice repeated.

"Who are you, and how did you get this number?" I asked at last.

"Uh, sorry, I guess I should have said that first. It's just, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to call you. I mean, I can't call you my stepmom, because even if you were pretty much married to my mom you never adopted me and --"

I interrupted his rambling. "You're Bobby."

"I-I prefer Bob."

"I bet you do," I said, doing some math. He would be just a bit over eighteen now. She had been twenty-one when he was born, two years before we moved in together and became 'pretty much married'. It made me kind of dizzy to think of her as being almost forty. Turning forty myself, two years ago, had been weird enough.

That all took only a few instants to think through, and so I promptly continued, "Okay. Yes, you have reached the person you were trying to reach, and I guess you could call me Aunt if you have to call me something. That's half the question I asked. How about the other half?"

"I got it from mom's attorney," he admitted, then added that name, too. "He's your lawyer, too, right?"

"No," I said, rubbing the space between my eyebrows. "I hired him for her, and I paid him for her, but I never employed him to handle anything for me. But, yes, I did give him this number and I didn't change it afterwards." It had been almost six years. I was usually more careful than that. I guess I really had been more upset about losing her than I had wanted to admit. "Okay, Bobb--" I cut myself off before I called him what he didn't want to be called. You should only ever do that if you want to hurt someone's feelings, and I didn't want to do that just yet. "Let's move on to obvious question number three. Why are you calling me instead of having your attorney do it?"

"Oh, he's not my lawyer."

"Oh," I said. That had been a test, and he passed. I might not ever want to have him working for me, but I was pretty familiar with that guy's clientele, and he would be unlikely to have an eighteen-year-old boy who wasn't a child star as one of them. Nor would his adoptive parents be part of it, either. She had given him up to one of her cousins, who had been the common clay of our great republic -- you know, morons -- and not the nouveau riche who might hire him. "But he gave you my number for nothing?" That was another test, of course.

"Well, I think he felt sorry for me. I should probably explain why I was talking to him in the first place."

"That would have been my next question, yes."

"Well, basically, I'm trying to find out who my father was. Or is, I guess. That's why I've come to Los Angeles, to meet you and talk about it."

I nodded. It's really stupid to do that when you're talking on the phone, but you'll be surprised how often people do that. "Right, yes, I can see why -- why you'd want to talk to me." Again, I didn't want to hurt his feelings just yet, and so stopped myself from saying 'why he'd feel sorry for you'. "Well, she never told me, but I can probably narrow the field for you, at least. But we should probably talk about this face-to-face. Where are you staying?"

"Well, I was planning on checking into a youth hostel, once I got out of the airport."

I couldn't help myself. I laughed. "Oh wow, you -- you called me as soon as you got off the plane, didn't you?"

"Well, yes," he admitted. "I came here to see you, so --"

"Right, right." Just like nodding, shaking your head under these circumstances is completely pointless. I did it anyway. "Forget the youth hostel for now. I'm going to call an Uber to bring you here to my place, and we'll get you settled some place after we talk a bit, okay?"

"Thank you so much -- uh, Aunt!" he said, after almost calling me by name. Well, fair was fair, given the number of times I'd stopped myself from staying stuff to him.

"It's the least I can do," I lied. The least I could have done was hanging up and blocking his number, then looking to change mine. "See you soon."

When I hung up, I let out a sigh. My ex-girlfriend's son was coming to see me. It sounded like the start of one of my movies. Of course, matters being what they were, it was a movie that could never be made, given that my ex-girlfriend -- technically my late girlfriend, not ex-anything, given that we had still been "pretty much married" when she died in prison -- had been my half-sister, and so I really was his blood-related aunt. Life is just filled with these little twists. My life is at least.

---

The best thing about Uber, I think, is the way that their software lets you track the progress of the ride you've requested on a map ... at least, as long as the software doesn't mess up. Fortunately, that hadn't happened this time, so I had lots of warning that the car bringing Bobby to the door of the condo and could get out of the underwear I had been wearing to do the financials and into something a bit more glamorous, plus do my make-up so that I stopped looking like someone's aunt and started looking like a femme fatale. Since one could fairly say that I had led his mother to her doom -- with her enthusiastic approval, and without any realization that said doom would involve her getting knifed in prison -- I guessed the look was appropriate.

Anyway, I got to the front door just as the doorbell rang, and opened it up with a transparently fake smile that vanished as soon as I saw him and realized, immediately, who his father had to be.

"Uh ... hi?" he said, making it a question, probably because of how my face had fallen so suddenly.

"Hello, Bob," I said, trying to recover my smile. "I'm sorry, it's just so -- you've grown up so much from the photos your mom showed me. I mean, obviously you would, you were just a little kid in them, but it's still so -- what am I doing, come in, come in!" I beckoned him with gestures as well as words. I did not lay a hand on him, though. He had to enter freely, of his own will. And he did.

I led him to the kitchenette, gave him a cup of coffee -- the good stuff, not the swill he might have gotten elsewhere -- and sat him down at the breakfast table, then sat down myself on the other side. "Okay. So, how much of the story do you already know?" I asked. I had no doubt that his foster parents had treated him like a mushroom, but I needed to know just how much shit he had been fed.

He took a deep breath. "Well, I know that you and mom were technically stepsisters, but you had already moved out to go to college when my grandma married your father. So, by the time you, well --"

"'Hooked up'," I supplied.

"Right, that. There wasn't any family bond, there."

Boy oh boy was he wrong. "Sort of. I first met your mom around the time my parents got divorced, just a bit after I turned nineteen. Your grandmother and I couldn't stand each other -- well, she couldn't stand me, and I didn't care about her one way or another -- but right from the start I liked her just fine. You're right that I didn't think of her as a sister, though." Such a fucking liar I am. I had figured out almost immediately that she was the affair baby, to use modern terminology. It's true that this didn't change what I thought about her, but when I ended up in bed with her and dad at the same time, on her eighteenth birthday, the fact that my sister was going down on me while our father pounded away behind her was a major turn-on. I definitely thought of her as a sister, then and all the way through the decade when we lived together.

And the whole time, the bitch had been lying to me. If she was still alive ... well, no, I wouldn't have killed her. I'd have screamed, I'd have raged, I might have thrown her out ... but when she finally begged for me to forgive her, which she would have because she had no where else to go, I would have forgiven her despite knowing that she was going to go right on lying to me. That was the sort of toxic combination that we were.

Again, that whole thought process took about a second. Then I spoke up some more. "I kept in touch with her while I was out of state, and I have a pretty good idea of at least some of the guys she was dating when she went to that finishing school that her mom picked out. But one of them we can rule out immediately. The guy her mom wanted her to marry is not your father, so if you were hoping that you were a Roberts --"

"I don't have any expectations of him, whoever he is," Bob said quickly. Too quickly. "I just want to know my story. But, I mean, why are you so sure?"

I was so sure because he looked just like his father. The lie came easily all the same because it was one I'd been told. "Well, DNA testing might have been in its infancy then, but that guy's family would have insisted on it, and she knew it, so she told me that she'd told her mom that she could never pass that test. That's why she got thrown out of her house. She'd messed up all your grandma's plans for her to marry a Roberts and for the two of them to live off them. She washed up at her cousins' place, and they agreed to adopt you." I air quoted "adopt"; I wasn't sure, but I doubted that there had been any paperwork involved with this.

"And two years later, the two of you met again and fell in love."

I managed to keep from rolling my eyes at that. Minor miracle.

"Was she maybe with my dad for a while before that?" he asked.

"Bobby," I said, infusing the kiddy name with as much pity as I could manage. "When your mom and I met again, she was serving drinks at one of the bars where I feature danced. She was also turning tricks there. Your dad was not in the picture by that point."

And that was the truest thing I'd told him. His father had been dead for eight months, two weeks and three days by that point. That was when I had thrown a radio, still plugged into the outlet, into the tub where he was bathing, after he told me that he planned to get back with my mother. I didn't love my mother, and she had certainly been with worse men in the years since the divorce, but I was not about to let him wreck her life any further than he already had. I never told my mother that I'd done this, but I had told my sister -- and maybe that was why she never told me that she'd had a kid with our dad.

Who was sitting in front of me right now, who had no idea that I was his half-sister as well as his aunt, and whom I had decided to fuck about a moment after I saw his face and knew who'd fathered him.