Searching for Yesterday (19 page)

Kayla's face clouded over suddenly. “But
he
must have known — or suspected anyway!” she said angrily. She raved a bit about him shirking his responsibility and never mentioning it through all the years and everything that had happened, and how she couldn't believe he'd be that way and just didn't understand it.

“Well!” she said flipping open her phone and dialling,
“We'll just ask him to his face!”

I thought Annie was going to pass out when she said that! Her mouth flapped a few times but she didn't get any words out and, the next thing we knew, Kayla had practically yelled into the phone for Brandon to get down to the flower shop right this minute because he had some serious explaining to do.

Brandon came through the door about ten minutes later. He looked curious, but not worried or anything.

“What's going on?” he asked Kayla after saying quick “hellos” to Annie and me.

“What's going on? What's going on?” Kayla echoed. “First off, you tell me right here and now — and you'd better tell me the truth, buster — did you ever go out with Gina?”

“What? You're asking me that after all these years? What's the big deal about it now? Okay, yes, we went out for a while — and we both knew how you felt about it, so we kept it quiet. We broke it off when I left for university.”

Kayla was silent.

“What's this all about?” Brandon asked. He looked back and forth from his sister to Annie.

“We believe that you may be Annie's father,” Kayla said simply.

“Well, you're wrong,” he said, shaking his head. “Remember when I got my bachelor degree and came back here for a year to work before I went on for my teaching
degree? I saw Gina that year — she was out walking with her little, uh, with Annie and Jayzelle and I ran into her. Jayzelle and I had just gotten engaged back then.

“Anyway, I asked Gina how old her little girl was — because I could see she was around three or four and naturally, I, uh, wondered. And she said, she'd be four that September, which meant there was no way she was mine, because the timing just wouldn't have worked.”

Brandon looked sorrowfully at Annie. “I'm really sorry,” he said. “I know you had your hopes up that you might have found your dad, and I
swear
, if it was me I'd be proud to call you my daughter. But it's just not possible.”

Tears brimmed over Annie's eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She tried several times to speak, but it took a few attempts before she got the words out.

“My birthday,” she said, “is the sixth of April.”

It got pretty emotional after that. I felt like an intruder, being there to witness the whole thing, but I'm glad I was. Brandon realized, of course, that Gina had lied to him — probably because he was engaged to someone else. Maybe she didn't want to cause them problems, or she might have worried that he'd try to get custody, and that with a good job and a home and wife it would have seemed like a real threat. Whatever her reasons had been, Brandon had accepted her word.

But when Annie told him when her birthday really was, he just walked straight over to her and put his arms around her and the two of them cried and cried.

My first thought after that was that Annie would finally be going to live with her real family. I guess it was Brandon's first thought, too, because he said something about it right away and he seemed sure that Jayzelle would be one hundred percent in favour of the plan, too.

But Annie had other ideas.

“For years,” she said, “that's all I've thought about. Having a real home and real parents. But you know what? I've just realized that I
have
that, with Pearl and Lucas. I've been there for a few years, and they've been great — only I kind of kept myself closed off from them because of other things. But since we found out about my mom being dead, they've just been amazing and I finally realized — they really love me. And I love them, too.

“So, as excited as I am, I really don't want to leave the home and family I have. At least, not yet.”

So it was worked out that Annie would start spending weekends at Brandon and Jayzelle's place, getting to know them and her half-siblings — and she was thrilled about that.

Kayla was thrilled too. She jumped up all of a sudden and said, “Oh my goodness! I'm your aunt! Your real aunt.”

“A father and an aunt,” Annie said. And there were more tears!
A happy ending, in some ways, I'm sure you'll agree. But very sad in other ways.

Gina Berkley was dead all those years that everyone thought she'd abandoned her child. I wonder why no one looked into it harder at the time. It would have been hard on Annie to bury her mother back then, too, but at least she wouldn't have had to go through eight years of thinking her mother didn't care about her.

Gina's friends gave up on her before she disappeared, and I can't help but think if they hadn't, maybe things would have been different.

We all need to look out for each other — old friends and new.

Which reminds me: Annie and I are just on our way to go visit Betts.

In the acknowledgements of my last published work,
Three Million Acres of Flame
, I overlooked someone who had assisted me early on, with research material and an important contact name. With my apologies for the oversight, my sincere thanks go to Miramichi author Doug Underhill for his very generous support in that project.

As always, I am grateful for the blessings and inspirations in my life, which include, in part, the following people:

My husband, partner, and best friend, Brent.

My parents, Bob and Pauline Russell.

My son Anthony, his wife Maria, and daughters Emilee, Ericka, and Veronicka. My daughter Pamela and her husband, David Jardine. My brothers and their families: Danny and Gail; Andrew, Shelley, Bryce, and Drew. My “other” family: Ron and Phoebe Sherrard,
Ron Sherrard and Dr. Kiran Pure, Bruce and Roxanne Mullin, and Karen Sherrard.

My sixth grade teacher, the late Alf Lower, whose influence lives on.

Friends: Janet Aube, Jimmy Allain, Karen Arseneault, Dawn Black, Darlene Cowton, Mekayla Cowton, Eric Fallon, Rosemary Fowlie, Angi Garofolo, Karen Gauvin, John Hambrook, Sandra Henderson, Gail and Paul Jardine, Thelma and Lorne Livingston, Mary Matchett, Johnnye Montgomery, Colleen Power, Mark Rhodes, Nancy Runstedler, Marsha Skrypuch, Linda Stevens, Pam Sturgeon, Bonnie Thompson, and Beatrice Tucker.

At The Dundurn Group, the whole team in general and my editor, Barry Jowett in particular. (Thanks for lending me Ernie and Pepo for my stories. They asked me to mention that, in light of their celebrity status, a little more subservience would be nice.)

Some of the characters in this story were named by or for students. Thanks to Chris Inkpen, Kayla Fulton (brother Brandon), Charlene Neilands (Jayzelle), Keenan Norton (brother Lucas) and Madison Nastasiuk for the wonderful character names.

Teenagers! Hearing from you is always awesome. Recent e-mails and letters have come from: Evita Avakian, Kate Bell, Emma Budreo, Sabrina Bungaro, Amanda Carruthers, Kennedy Chadwick, Maddie Chefero, Shelby Corcoran, Alyssa Dickinson, Dawn Drakes-Jones, Rebekah Dubé, Colin Fletcher, Eden Hurlburt, Danielle
Insley, Meaghan Leslie, Yimin Liang, Kathryn Lynch, Alaynna Moyer, Katie Neally, Athelma Needham, Philip Ng, Laura O'Grady, Julia Oelbaum, Cassidy Pipher, Alex Racicot, Anisha Rao, Fiona Robson, Aoife Ryan, Kirstyn Ryzebol, Tressa Sheffield, Zack Stevenson, Josh Storm, Lauren Strumos, Ardyn Tettmar, Hanna Valle, Kelvin Yam, and Hunster Yang.

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