“Yes. He was in graduate school in Boston.”

Josh let the silence rest between them. “Anything else, Mom?”

“Do you have a form I can fill out? It would be more pleasant than this.”

He almost laughed. “I’d like whatever information you have.”

“Are you sick? Do you need a family history?” Her forehead crinkled with worry.

“No. Not at all. Not sick.”

She sighed. “He left me when I was four months pregnant, Joshua. He knew what he was doing, too. I told him the minute I found out, and he made the choice to—what do you kids call it?—to ghost me. He is not your father. He was an unpaid sperm donor who left us both.”

“I know that, Mom.” He sighed. “The thing is, I have too much time on my hands. I miss Lauren.” His voice broke. “I don’t have that many . . . people. Outside of you and Ben and Sumi, I have two relatives that I know of—your cousin, and her daughter. I’d just like to . . . see where I came from, genetically speaking.”

“Oh, so you do want to meet him! I see!” She tossed down her fork, and it hit the plate with a clatter. “You think after thirty-one years, he’s going to take you to a ball game and teach you to catch?”

“No. I would just like to meet him. One time.” He hadn’t been sure of this until the words left his mouth.

She said nothing, though she may have hissed. Then she anger-ate her dessert, stabbing her fork through the innocent cake like she was murdering it, chewing fiercely. She chugged her coffee milk.

“Mom,” he said gently, “you are the person I most admire in the world. You and my wife. That will never change. What you did, having me alone when you were still a college student, graduating, working in a highly competitive field, raising me to be a good person . . . it was remarkable. You are remarkable.”

Her face softened just a little. “That’s true.”

“The way you loved and took care of Lauren . . . and me . . . don’t think for a second that I will ever, ever forget that.”

She looked away, her mouth trembling a little, her equivalent of a sobbing wreck.

“But I’d like to meet my father. It won’t change anything. I just want to . . . know.”

She wiped her eyes on her napkin. Took another bite of cake, a sip of coffee milk. “You know his name.”

“Yes. Christopher Zane.”

“He was from Indiana. His parents had a farm. He was getting his degree in . . . gosh, what was it? Environmental engineering. Or agricultural engineering. Something like that. He was at MIT, I was at Harvard. He went to Notre Dame for his bachelor’s, and on our first date, he got mad at me because I didn’t know who the Fighting Irish were.” She rolled her eyes.

Josh’s head was buzzing, even as his brain memorized the facts. That was more than his mother had told him about his father in his entire life.

“We dated for six weeks. I was a strict Lutheran, remember, and I thought premarital sex was for slutty girls, got carried away and had unprotected sex. I was stupid, I was in denial, so I told myself I had just skipped a period or two.” She sighed. “I knew, though. I kept hoping I wasn’t.” Her head jerked up. “Don’t get me wrong, Joshua. You’re the best thing in my life. I don’t regret you for one second.”

“I know that.”

“Good.” She patted his hand, then resumed stabbing her cake. “So when I couldn’t pretend anymore, I took a test and voilà! Pregnant. I told him. We fought. Abortion wasn’t on the table, not for me. We talked for about two seconds about getting married, but it was already clear we weren’t going to work. He said he’d ‘pay his share.’” She made air quotes around the words. “Then he went off on a project of some kind, some summer program, said he would call me when he got settled, and I never saw him again. I sent him a letter at his MIT address, which was the only one I had. It came back. His email address was defunct. I called him at his last known phone number. It was disconnected. That September, I called MIT, and they said he was no longer enrolled there.”

Silence settled over the kitchen. Outside, sleet started pattering against the window.

“And that was it, sweetheart,” she said, her voice gentler than when she’d started.

There was an unpleasant pressure in Josh’s chest. What kind of person turns his back on his unborn child and just disappears? For decades?

“Is he still alive?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I put his name on the birth certificate because I wanted evidence, I think.”

“Why didn’t you try to track him down and ask for child support?”

“I didn’t want it. Honestly, I would’ve lived in a box on the street before doing that.” She shrugged. “But my father was still alive back then, so he made sure we didn’t have to. I transferred to Brown, and they gave me a stipend, and between that and what Papa gave us, we were fine.”

“Did you ever Google him? Just out of curiosity?”

She pulled a face. “Yes. Once, when you were about ten. He was teaching at Northwestern and lived in Chicago. Or he did twenty years ago. So there it is. Everything I know. He completely abandoned us. Never looked back. So there you have it for when you plan your joyful reunion.”

“It’s just curiosity, Mom. And something to do.”

“You could dig ditches. You could clean toilets. Volunteer at a shelter for battered women.”

“Okay, okay. I get it. And I do volunteer at the Hope Center. Also, I just got my red belt in karate. Everyone else’s mom was there for the belt ceremony. I was sorry you couldn’t make it.”

There. She smiled. She’d laughed so hard when he told her about his kiddie karate classes.