“What’s wrong, son?”

Another deep breath. “My mom’s name was Susan Cutler. Ring any bells with you, Jack?”

“Did I know her?” he asked.

“For just a little while. You dated her for a couple of months back when you were at Fort Pendleton. I guess you were about twenty.”

“If I was twenty and at Fort Pendleton and dated your mother, I didn’t see much of her,” Jack said. “I imagine I’d have been in training there.”

“Sounds about right. You were just a couple of kids, younger than me.” He pulled an old and worn envelope out of the inside of his jacket pocket. “She had a hard time talking about when she was young. She always felt like she let me down. She never married, exposed me to a father figure who was a pure jackass, ended up raising me alone. She didn’t let me down—my mom was awesome. But, since she had trouble looking me in the eye and talking about it, she wrote me this letter. Then we talked about it. Would you read it?”

Jack lifted a brow. “You really want me to?”

“It’s not very long. Yeah, I’d like you to read it.” He put it on the bar and pushed it toward him.

Jack locked eyes with him as he pulled the envelope over. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. He opened it and read,

Denny, my dearest,

We both know this cancer is not going away, that it’s only a matter of time, and there’s something I have to tell you, but it’s so hard for me I’m putting the facts in a letter and then, if you want to, we can talk about it.

When I was twenty, I fell in love. Oh, I truly did, but I made the mistake of falling in love with a twenty-year-old Marine who was shipping out in a couple of months and didn’t want any commitments. He was good to me, a wonderful young man with a nice family, and we had a real good time together. We laughed so much! He was so kind and tender, but also strong and fearless. And as I was warned, he left. He told me from the first time he held my hand—there was an expiration date on our romance.

I was pretty brokenhearted, but I started dating Bob, also a Marine at the time, but not the best man in the world. I realized after a few weeks that I was pregnant and I knew Bob wasn’t the father. I’m sorry, Denny—I lied to you all these years because I was ashamed and sorry; also because I was afraid of what Bob would do to us if he knew I lied to him. The finest man I ever knew left, I never tried to find him because we had an agreement—no commitments. I let Bob and you think that Bob was your father. So… We know how Bob turned out—not only a bad example, but a poor excuse for a man—abusive, mean, unfaithful. The day he left for good was probably our best day. And now I feel like I’m failing you with this awful cancer. Denny, I’m not afraid to die, I’m just afraid to leave you with questions, and thinking you have a father with scary DNA you can’t be proud of! The truth is, Bob was not your father. Your father’s name is Jack Sheridan. I don’t know where he ended up or what became of him, but you can believe you did have a father you could be proud of.

There was more to the letter, but Jack let his hand drop to the bar while he stared, wide-eyed and openmouthed at Denny. He looked him straight on and said, in his Jack way, “Are you shitting me?”

Denny paled. “No, sir. You’re the guy I came to find.”

“Are we sure?” he asked.

“After the letter,” Denny said, “we talked about it. She was a young girl, but girls that age think they know everything—her words, not mine. She worked at Camp Pendleton. She got that job to meet guys, she said, but ended up working there for about ten years, a civilian employee. But she said she didn’t screw around. She liked to go out, go dancing, go to movies, parties, that kind of thing. I have some pictures,” he said, going back into that pocket. “She was so pretty.” He passed the pictures across the bar.

Jack frowned. She didn’t look twenty in the pictures, but older than that. He said nothing, just waited for Denny.

“She said when she met you, she just lost it. Totally fell for you, but you had some orders pending and said you could only date if it was understood…”

Jack shook his head sadly. “That sure sounds like Jack Sheridan….” He looked at the photos. Both of them were studio portraits taken with a much younger Denny. She was an attractive brunette with a sweet smile and a handsome little son. He wanted to bang his head on the bar. She looked vaguely familiar but he couldn’t remember her. He wanted to remember her so much he ached inside.

“She told me about your parents—your dad was some kind of stock broker or something. And your four sisters—two older, two younger and the little one still in grade school. But the part that embarrassed her and kept her from being honest with me—she started dating Bob right away after you left because she was so lonely and so heartbroken with you gone. And she realized she was pregnant and Bob couldn’t be the father by a month.” He shook his head. “She said there was no one else, Jack. And I know she was my mom, but I believe her anyway.”

“Denny, when I was twenty, I was at Pendleton for a few months. I remember dating a girl named Ginger for a while, but I was all caught up in the Corps. Ginger broke it off with me because I wouldn’t think serious.” He shrugged. “There might’ve been a couple of girls here and there, but I don’t remember any who could’ve been in love….”

“I know what being twenty in the Marines is like, Jack.”

Jack didn’t read the rest of the letter. He slid it across the bar toward Denny. “You’ve been up here for months,” Jack said.

“Yeah. It took me a while to get to know you, then I had to be sure the truth wouldn’t make your life harder, then… Then there was the time it took to get up the courage. Because once I let it out, I couldn’t take it back. You know?”

Jack lifted his shot and threw it back. With shot glass in hand, he pointed at Denny’s drink. “You’d better drink that, son.”

Denny lifted the drink, but paused. “Look, I get it if you say this isn’t the happiest day of your life.”

Jack scowled. “Drink,” he said. When Denny put down the glass Jack said, “Any man would be proud to have you for a son. Any man, me included. I’m just having a real hard time with the facts, with knowing what kind of man I was, that I’d scare a woman off telling me she’s pregnant because I can’t be bothered with the responsibility. And I’m having a real goddamn hard time thinking I had the kind of relationship that would bring me a son and… And I can’t remember her.”

Jack leaned on the bar. “Accidents happen all the time, Denny, but I gotta be honest with you—I was careful. Not stupid careful—I was always armed with protection. When you talked to your mother, did she say anything like that we knew there was a problem? Like a blowout or something?”

“I couldn’t get into that with her, Jack. She was my mother. And she was sick.”

Jack felt his chest go tight. Here he was thinking about himself when this kid had discovered one man was not his father and another was—all when his mother was dying! And he was thinking about whether his condom had a hole in it? “What kind of cancer, Denny?”

“Breast, then it spread. She was so young, she didn’t get checked, didn’t get good medical care. It was an aggressive cancer. We spent five years beating it back then it would pop up somewhere else, then more chemo, then a few good months that looked promising, then— Thing is, she couldn’t beat it. And she wanted me to have the truth before she died.” Denny swallowed. “We don’t have to tell anyone, Jack.”

Jack just shook his head. “That’s not the important thing, Denny. It’s not about keeping it a secret….” He shook his head. “There are some truths about me, son—one of ’em is that until I met Mel, I hadn’t met a woman I was tempted to settle down with, to start a family with, but I never thought of myself as cruel. Maybe I’ve just been lying to myself about that. There must have been a reason your mom wasn’t brave enough to look for me, to tell me about you….”

“Lots of reasons,” Denny said. “She never blamed you. She was with a guy who thought I was his and he wasn’t a nice guy. He never even married her. I can’t think of a thing my mom ever did that was bad or wrong, but he slapped her around anyway. She was too scared of him to tell the truth, to break free and try to find you. By the time he was out of the picture, too many years had passed.”

“It never once occurred to me to tell a woman that even if I didn’t feel like being married, I could be responsible…” Jack’s voice faded out.

“Soldiers, Marines, they do things like that,” Denny said. “I did that. I was with a girl right before Afghanistan and I told her I didn’t want to be worrying about attachments while I was—”

Jack put a hand over his forearm. “Denny, even if I couldn’t have been a husband, I could have been a father. I should have been supporting you, knowing you, teaching you. Not easy for a Marine, a single Marine at that, but I would have liked to have tried. At the least, I could have been there for you when you were losing your mother. I could have been waiting for you to come home from war.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry I didn’t know. But I know now.”

Denny smiled. “Hey. I don’t expect anything. I just wanted to know you, that’s all. Really, I didn’t think I’d be this lucky, to find out you’re a guy I actually like, a guy I’d want for a friend even if there wasn’t any other connection. But Jack, you don’t have to do anything. I like things the way they are.” He grinned boyishly. “I don’t need a kidney or anything. I can support myself just fine.”

Jack poured another couple of shots. “I usually limit myself to one, but it’s a big night. You should move back out to the guesthouse if you want. Rent free, of course.”

“What I want is to take care of myself. It’s what I’d want to do even if you’d been around the past twenty-four years. In fact, from what I know of you so far, I bet it’s what you would have raised me to do.”

Jack lifted his glass. “You’re probably right about that.”

Right at that moment Preacher came into the bar from the kitchen. “I’m gonna have to learn to wash up faster if I want company for that shot,” he said. “You’re getting ahead of me.”

“Let me pour you one,” Jack said. “Wait till you hear the news. Uncle Preacher.”

Mel sat cross-legged on the king-size bed, her laptop pushed to the side, while Jack paced and talked, telling her the story Denny had told him. He would periodically stop pacing, bend at the waist and lean both hands on the bed and add something emphatic. Dramatic. Then he’d pace again.

“Unbelievable,” she finally said. “Then again, not. There’s even a slight resemblance. But then, I took Rick for your son when I first met him. How many more of them do you think are out there?” she asked.

“Do you think you’re being funny?”

“Um, not really,” she said. “I thought I was being a little concerned.”

“Listen, I’m telling you the absolute truth when I say that this is the last thing I expected to hear. I was seriously very, very cautious. I got an A in biology. I didn’t take chances.”

“Till you got to me?” she asked.

“Frankly, yes! You were entirely different! I was completely in love with you! I wanted to be with you forever! I totally lost my mind!”

“Could you please not raise your voice? First of all, I didn’t do this to you and second, the kids are sleeping.”