Wait. Wait. Wait!!

I'm telling this all wrong!

Ok-ok, yeah, I know, I jumped right into the middle of things and forgot to tell you how it all started! What you must think of me!!

Ok-ok, it all started back a couple of months ago at my mom's restaurant, The Happy Waffle. It was a Saturday morning and Mary Sue, that's my mom, saw Jim and Blair come in for their monthly pancake breakfast. They'd been coming in pretty regular-like, ever since my mom let the detective know he was her hero and she told Blair she knew he lied on TV about lyin'. But, anyway, that's a whole 'nother story. After that day, my mom started givin' 'em two-for-one breakfast deals once a month or so, and she kept the other customers off their backs about that whole Superman thing that got 'em in trouble back then, so...

But that's another story, too, so I'll just move on to this new one.

It seems that Mr. Sandburg, you know him as Blair, he's what they used to call a bastard with the old-fashioned meaning, and his mama never told him who his daddy was. I mean he said he made guesses sometimes and some of his guesses were pretty funny -- Timothy Leary, for God's sake! But most of the time his face just got all serious when he listened to me and my mom talk to Jim about our dads. My dad left when I was ten and he never called or wrote, and I gather Jim wasn't too close to his own dad. But at least we know who our dads were. But poor Blair, he would just sit and listen and I figured he wished he had a dad to say bad things about, if you know what I mean.

Well, anyway, like I was saying, the guys come into The Happy Waffle a couple of months ago and Mary Sue sees something's wrong. She waits 'til after they eat, in case the pancakes cheer them up (and if pancakes can do it, Mary Sue's can!).

But no good. They're still glum, so Mary Sue gets up her courage and asks 'em, "What's wrong with you boys?" (She calls 'em 'boys,' even though Jim is almost her age - I think that's pretty funny.)

Well, she can see Jim isn't up to talkin'. I've noticed that about him -- he kind of clams up and even if he likes you, he sort of gets this look like you broke some rule or something, like asking "'sup?" should get you a night in jail. So there he is all silent and grumpy, so Mary Sue looks over at Blair, who's playin' with his spoon. Lookin' at it. Or maybe lookin' at his face in the back of it. Then, he looks up at Mary Sue and apologizes with his eyes. But when he opens up his mouth, no words come out for a minute.

Well, I don't know what she was thinkin' but Mary Sue just drags up a chair to the table, sets her butt down and says, "Spill it, son."

Well, he don't spill right away, but my mom has this way of makin' you talk. And besides, she told me later she could tell he really wanted to talk but was stuck.

So she says, "I can see somethin's troublin' you, son, and can I just say, if you was my kid, and I'm almost old enough to be your mama, I'd want to hug you and make it all better, but you ain't my kid so I got to wait here until you get some sense and realize that spittin' it out is the best thing for you."

And she crosses her arms in front of her chest and just looks at him hard.

Well, he sort of half clears his throat and half giggles for a second like maybe he's gonna talk, but Jim pipes up with,

"Maybe this is none of your goddamn business."

Which takes my mom back a bit. She kind of nods and starts to get up, when Blair rests his hand on her arm and says,

"It's about my dad."

And I can just about picture the whole restaurant going dead silent at that.

It takes her a minute to recover, but then she asks, real quiet and slow-like, "You found out who he is?"

"Yeah," he says, "but now he's dead, so I'll never find out--"

And there he leaves off.

Now it all gets kind of hazy here. Turns out Mary Sue's been callin' him about once a week since then just to see he's ok. And she won't tell me everything he says, 'cause it's private.

So what I'm gonna tell you is what I've pieced together from stuff she let leak out now and then.

It seems that back in 1968, Blair's mom, Naomi Sandburg, took up with a man twice her age. She was only twenty years old and had just been kicked out of her own parents' house for speakin' up against a war over in Vietnam that was goin' on back then.

Well, she had no place to go, so she moved in with some friends from college.

Well, I suppose it was a bit of a wild crowd. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing there was a lot of parties with people gettin' high on a lot of things, and it was at one of these parties that Naomi met David Stevenson.

It seems our little Naomi was really taken by this guy - he was so smart, so funny, so sweet, and so cute. He had these most beautiful blue eyes, which seemed to get bigger the more she looked into them.

Well, the two of 'em just hit it off right away - for Naomi, it was love at first sight.

And for the next three months, they traveled up and down the West Coast, just soakin' up all the beauty of nature. Everything was beautiful between the sweethearts, too, until Naomi come up pregnant.

David wanted Naomi to get an abortion, which wasn't even legal back then, but Naomi believed in following the path of nature, so she said no. And that's when all the fighting started.

Well, the upshot was, she finds out that good ol' David Stevenson's married all this time. Turns out he'd been married for some fifteen years and had four kids between the ages of six and thirteen. He said he 'loved' his family but I guess he decided to take a little vacation when he turned forty. I suppose instead of takin' a vacation in Hawaii, he decided to take one in Naomi.

Well, anyway, when Naomi finds out all this during one of their fights, she grabs up her big shoulder bag, hikes out to the highway, sticks out her thumb, and gets a ride up north.

The guy that picks her up, a history teacher at a community college up here in Washington state, listens to her story, feels sorry for her, and gives her his sister's address up in Cascade. He lets her off at the Greyhound bus station, gives her some money for the bus and some lunch, and takes off.

Well, there she is over a thousand miles from anyone she knows, with nothin' but a big bag packed with a toothbrush and odds and ends. She knows she smells a bit ripe since she hadn't bathed much on the camping trip. And she's hungry but the smell of the bus station food is bringing on the morning sickness.

Well, what could she do? So she tries to do a sink bath in the ladies' room and does some deep breathin' to keep from upchuckin' the nothing in her stomach.

When she's pulled herself together, she goes out, gets a glass of milk and some crackers, and decides 'what the hell,' and gets a ticket for Cascade, Washington.

So that's how Blair come to be born there in the May of 1969.

Well, seems as though that history teacher's sister, Julia, let Naomi stay for a couple of weeks while Naomi tried to figure out what she was gonna do. Julia helped Naomi find a room for rent in the back of an old lady's house. The place had about as much stuff in it as you get in a cheap motel room. So she found herself a tiny fridge and an electric skillet so she could eat at home.

Now, Mary Sue wasn't too clear on this but I think Naomi got some money from a cousin of hers, name of Robert, that run some sort of business connected somehow with sports like horse racing. Not exactly sure what kind, though.

Anyway, she was okay until the baby came and then things got kind of hard. She wasn't eatin' quite enough sometimes and she got the baby blues and things looked kind of bad for her.

Well, one day the old lady at the front of the house, Mrs. Danbush, wandered out back to check on a noise or something and she hears cryin,' and it takes her a minute to figure out it's not just the baby makin' that noise, it's the mama, too.

That was just too much for Mrs. Danbush, so she moves the two of them up to her own house, where they stayed for a few years.

Now, Mrs. Danbush was a pretty open-minded lady for the times, so she didn't say nothin' about Blair not havin' a daddy. And she kind of looked the other way when she noticed Naomi seemed to have a new boyfriend every few months. But she did speak up when she overheard one of the guys tell Naomi she should lose the kid.

Mrs. Danbush figured out right then that Naomi's boyfriends kept comin' and goin' cause she was tied down with her son and they didn't want nothin' to do with him.

I'm guessing when they met Naomi at the coffee shop she worked at, they thought she looked like fun, a good time. I mean she has that playful spirit, you know. But when they see her being a mom, they kind of lost interest.

So, anyway, Mrs. Danbush ask her about this, and Naomi just broke down, cryin' her eyes out, sayin' how they always want her to choose - the men or her baby - how his daddy practically come out and said if she would've had the abortion, he would've stayed with her. But she couldn't do that, couldn't kill her baby for him then, and couldn't leave her boy for these new men, now.

Well, let me just tell you, when Mary Sue told me all this, I just broke down myself.

And there's even more to this story.

Naomi never told Blair who his daddy was, that his daddy wanted an abortion, or why all those men kept leavin.'

Well, after a while -- I think Blair was about eight or nine -- Naomi decides, for some reason, they should go stay with some cousins in Texas, and they do for a while, but then they move back to Cascade when Blair starts high school and he's been there ever since, except when he's taken off on field trips for his classes or something, but that's another story, too.

Well, Blair starts up at the college when he's sixteen, and his mom's still young, so she decides, hey I can go travel on my own, and she does.

I guess that brings us up to a couple of months ago.

Naomi comes back to town to see Blair about something important but she's still not so sure the guys are gonna want to see her, after that whole thing about Blair's book got put on the TV. Seems she had somethin' to do with that.

And here she come with more bad news: Blair's daddy's died at the age of seventy of a heart attack.

Hearin' that was bad enough but turns out Blair and Naomi have themselves a wake, complete with too much wine, and Blair starts pinnin' her down on who his father was and why didn't she marry him and why wouldn't she tell him about him all those years.

And the whole ugly story I just told you comes out and Blair's just -

Well,. There ain't no words to say how he was inside.

But Mary Sue says to hear Jim tell it, Blair got ferocious mad and beat up the loft. And somethin' in what he yelled while he punched walls and kicked tables gave Jim the idea that Blair's thinkin' about all those men that hated him. How they took him to basketball games, and he always thought, or wanted to think, they really liked him.

And I don't know why but he starts yellin' at Naomi to get out. Mary Sue says it's something about messages and messengers. I guess.

So last night Naomi comes back to town and things really go south.

She's stayin' at a motel 'cause she's too scared to go to Blair and Jim's place. She sits on the bed there with her old photo album and a lot of wine. And what she's doin' is lookin' at her life in pictures.

She takes out pictures she hasn't seen in over 30 years and lays 'em out on the bedspread while she drinks wine by the tumbler-full. And she reads her life backwards from 1999 to 1968.

She lays them down with that flicking sound you get when you play solitaire.

Flick and there's Jim and Blair at Blair's twenty-ninth birthday, Jim with his hand restin' gently on her son's shoulder and Blair smilin' up like there's nobody in the world as great as his friend.

Flick and there's the three of them, a picture taken that same day by Simon.

Flick -- the first time she met Jim.

The day Blair got his MA.

His BA.

His high school graduation.

And the men. All the men.

From the last to the first.

Until finally she took a big ol' deep breath, closed her eyes and opened the envelope that she'd tucked into the back of the album.

Slowly she sets down this last one, the picture she hadn't dared look at in all those years.

Funny how David looks so young, she thinks, and she realizes that she's ten years older, now, than he was when they met. And something about that thought just shakes her up more.

She opens up another bottle of wine and takes up all the pictures and shuffles them like she really is gonna play solitaire this time.

But this time she searches the deck, finds father and son, and sets them side by side. The forty-year-old David and the twenty-nine-year-old Blair. And as she looks from the one to the other, she's cooing to them both, stroking first the one cheek, then the other; one set of full lips, then the other; one head of dark curly hair, then the other.

'Til she just shakes all over and cries her eyes out.

That's when somethin' just come over her and she ups and calls a cab and goes to the loft.

And you know the rest.

And when Jim finds her naked on the floor of Blair's room, Blair scrabblin' to get away, Jim yells,

"What the fuck is going on here, Naomi?!"

And he can't believe his eyes when Naomi reaches out for the only man she ever loved, the first of many she could never have, and whimpers in anguish.

"David?"

Oh, btw, David Stevenson isn't his real name -- I had to change it to protect his family's privacy -- and also because he was Blair's dad, I just felt I should for Blair's sake.