Darling Kipper

Sophie Jenkins lifted a hard plastic tray from the stack and moved through the cafeteria on numb legs. God, she was tired, so much so that she could feel her brain sitting like a brick in her head.

She eyed the salad fixings, her usual go to, then moved on. Screw it. Tonight would be meatloaf with hard-baked ketchup – her favorite – mashed potatoes, and buttered carrots. A slice of chocolate cream pie, because why not? She would do it for her father. He would never enjoy chocolate cream pie again.

Sophie filled her plate, moving the tray along the railing as she went. When she reached the register, she offered a wan smile to Molly, a petite, silver-haired woman, as constant as a sunrise in her ten years at the hospital.

Molly rang up the meal, her watchful gaze taking in Sophie’s dark hair worn loose, her NYU sweatshirt and jeans. “Not working tonight?”

“No.” Sophie tapped her badge to the scanner, and it registered payment.

“How’s your dad?”

Tears sprang to Sophie’s eyes. “He passed a few hours ago, around noon.”

“Oh, honey.” Small, careworn hands enveloped Sophie’s. “I’m so sorry. I know you were hoping…” She trailed off and released Sophie’s hands. “They couldn’t get the swelling down.”

“No, and he never gained consciousness.” Sophie smiled through her tears. “But he didn’t suffer. I’ll hold onto that.”

They said their farewells, and Sophie stopped by a coffee station – hazelnut with one shot of vanilla cream – before heading toward the large seating area, her mind still wrestling with the knowledge that her father had been alive and well just yesterday morning.

Henry Jenkins, Hank to family and friends, was a man of routine. A commercial furniture sales rep forty years running, he spent half his time in Manhattan, the other half in Boston. Like clockwork, his morning jog had taken him near the entrance to Central Park when the distracted driver had struck him. Two minutes later, and Hank would have disappeared into the safety of the park. If time was a thief, timing was a bitch.

The doctors had kept him sedated, hoping the swelling in his brain would diminish. But before he could wake, a blood clot had stilled his heart, and he was gone.

Sophie had sat with him in silence for a time, kissed his forehead, then wandered into a staff breakroom and dozed on a sofa until hunger roused her.

Sophie’s mother Ann, a hard-hitting corporate attorney, had passed the year before from ovarian cancer. Both parents had been workaholics, and by the age of twelve, Sophie largely managed her own life, getting herself to and from the all-girl’s school half a mile from their West End condo. Their cook, Juanita, prepared their meals in the bright white, stainless steel kitchen that Ann remodeled from top to toe, yet never used. Hank and Ann had settled into more of a supportive business partnership than a marriage, and while Sophie knew that each loved her, she grew up feeling more like a project, a portfolio, than a person. Success, more than anything, got their attention. It explained Sophie’s resolve to suffer the meatgrinder of medical school.

And now, mere months into a five-year residency, their only child was an orphan at the age of twenty-six.

Clutching her tray, Sophie headed toward the far wall, past a handful of other diners, a few guests in street clothes, a few employees in scrubs. She kept her gaze trained on the floor, thankful that no one called to her as she slipped past the occupied tables. She simply didn’t have the energy for conversation, not even for her father’s attorney, who had left her a voice mail two hours earlier. A Cody Mathias, someone she’d never heard of, but then, Hank Jenkins had never shared his afterlife plans with his only daughter. How many parents actually did that?

Sophie approached the back tables, glanced up…and froze. What the hell…

A young man sat at her favorite table, a corner booth with an L-shaped seat that afforded her the luxury of reclining her legs on the seat and observing the entire cafeteria. No one ever sat there. It was too far from the serving area for most visitors to even notice it. But this guy, dressed in a white golf shirt tucked into khaki pants, was definitely a visitor. He looked college-age, tall and lean, a runner’s physique. A partially eaten meal lay before him, forgotten. He had the look she knew all too well. Lost. Wondering why. Wondering what happens now.

Sophie turned, glancing around for another isolated spot, when his voice caught her up. “Is this your table?”

“What?” Sophie turned back. “No, I can sit anywhere.”

“This is your table.” He shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts, and glanced at his runner’s watch. “It’s okay. I need to go.” He slid out and picked up his tray. “All yours,” he said, offering a thin smile that did not touch his eyes.

“Thanks.” Sophie slid into the booth, the seat still warm. A soundless laugh escaped her throat as she placed the napkin in her lap and surveyed the cafeteria. She was very much like her father. Clockwork. Routine.

Sophie forked a morsel of meatloaf and chewed slowly, savoring it. Juanita had made the best meatloaf, mixing in chopped jalapenos, onions, herbs, and cumin. Sophie would need to call her after the funeral arrangements were made…

An electronic chirp sounded, and Sophie’s gaze dropped. Sure enough, a cell phone lay on the seat beside her, obscured by the tabletop. She scanned the cafeteria, and there he was, the bright white golf shirt moving through the serving area toward the exit.

Sophie grabbed the phone and slid from her seat. As she did, the phone’s screen popped to life, locked but displaying a background picture of the young man on a golf course, grinning at the camera, standing next to an older man…

The world tilted as a rush of lightheadedness washed through Sophie, and she leaned her free hand on the back of the booth.

The other man was clearly her father. This guy, whoever he was, knew her father.

Adrenaline coursed through her weary bones. She’d met very few of her father’s business associates over the years, especially after she graduated from NYU and moved to Baltimore for med school. That had been the worst of it, losing her mother just before the final grueling push at Johns Hopkins.

But it had served to unite father and daughter. Upon returning home for her residency at Mount Sinai, they connected in ways they hadn’t before. Breakfast or dinner at a favorite eatery when he was in town. Calls, just to chat about their day. A Broadway show, drinks at a jazz club. Three months, only three months, but she understood now that it’s possible to spend years with a person and not really do life with them. Intimacy and proximity did not go hand-in-hand. Intimacy was intentional.

The photo on this young man’s phone reflected intimacy. The two smiled easily. They stood near each other, hands resting on the top of their putters. Was this fellow an intern, perhaps even an emerging hotshot on her father’s sales team?

Whoever he was, he was almost out the door.

Sophie’s feet moved on their own, jogging past the other diners, earning her curious stares. “Excuse me,” she called, and the young man turned, dark eyes widening in surprise as she stopped a few feet away. “You left your phone.”

“Oh, wow. Thanks,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

She held it up rather than handing it over. “You’re here for Henry Jenkins? Hank Jenkins?”

“Yes. How did you know that?” He glanced at the phone in her hand, still alight. “Oh. But how do you know him?”

“I’m his daughter. Sophie Jenkins.”

The young man went still, the color draining from his face. “What?”

“I’m…Sophie.” Something was wrong, alien, in his features. Her hand felt disconnected from her body as she handed the phone to him.

He studied the background photo as if seeing it for the first time. He swallowed, hard. “Must be a different Hank Jenkins. Has to be.”

Alarm bells were clanging in Sophie’s ears, and she folded her arms across her chest. “That’s my dad on your phone. Do you work at Hessen Office Group?”

“No.” His head snapped up again, eyes scanning her features. “Oh my God. You…I can see it now. You have his eyes. I just…I didn’t know…”

“You didn’t know he had a daughter?”

Wonder spread across his features like a sunrise across a dark meadow. “I didn’t know I had a sister.”

***

His name was Tyler Blankenship, but he went by Ty. Twenty years old, an electrical engineering student at U Mass in Boston, his hometown. His mother Jane, a piano teacher who moonlighted with a jazz band on the weekends. A brother and sister, several years older.

Sophie and Ty sat in the corner booth, each cradling a third cup of coffee. Ty had received a call from the same attorney and arrived to sit at Hank’s side only an hour after she had left the room. There was no question Ty was Hank’s son. The crinkle between his brows, the way the corner of his mouth kicked upward when he smiled, the dark hair that matched Hank’s – and hers – the same shade of dark cocoa, his sun-lightened compared to hers.

Sophie wasn’t sure what shocked her more, that Hank Jenkins had fathered a son or that the son hadn’t learned who his father was until he was seventeen years old.

“My mom wouldn’t tell me, no matter how often I asked,” Ty said. “No name on my birth certificate, nothing to give me a hint. I finally gave up.” Ty took a sip of coffee, his gaze distant. “Until I was rummaging through some old boxes in the attic looking for my brother’s yearbooks. He and his family were coming to visit, and I told him I’d find his high school stuff. And there it was, this little box in the very back, full of love letters from a Hank Jenkins. I guess you never throw love letters away.”

Sophie was riveted. Her father? Love letters? “So then what? You showed her the letters?”

“Not right away. I wanted to find him first. Talk to him.”

As Ty spoke, Sophie realized she felt no anger, no malice, toward Ty or the body that lay in repose upstairs. Perhaps she was too tired, too numb to feel much at all. She knew from losing her mother that emotions would eventually come, flooding her, then subsiding. Anger. Regret. Loneliness. Perhaps even betrayal. But this boy deserved none of that.

“So he never told you about me?” This would haunt her most of all.

Ty shook his head. “I thought he lived in Boston and traveled to New York, but he didn’t have any pictures sitting out. Very bare bones, you know?”

Sophie knew. It sounded like her dad.

After a time, the words ran dry. They both slid from the booth and stretched.

Sophie stifled a yawn. “Are you supposed to meet with this attorney at nine in the morning?”

“Yeah. We’d better get some sleep.” Ty glanced at his watch. “I bet he thought he’d be the one to break the news to us.”

“Guess we outfoxed him. We should waltz in together and really blow his mind.”

  Ty tilted his head to the side. “We have the same sense of humor. I like that.”

***

Cody Mathias officed with three other estate planning attorneys in Greenwich Village. His secretary offered coffee and ushered Sophie and Ty into a simple, somewhat cluttered office.

“Cody Mathias. I see you’ve met,” he said simply as Sophie and Ty entered his office and shook hands. With his California cool and mop of dark hair, he looked like Keanu Reeves in a suit. He showed them to leather chairs opposite his desk, and, instead of taking his seat, perched on the edge of his desk. He folded his hands and shook his head. “I kept telling Hank to strike while the iron was hot. You were all living your lives, and it was time to bring you together. But he wasn’t ready. I don’t know if he ever would have been ready. Sometimes it’s just easier to think, ‘someday’. I see it all the time in my business.”

Sophie related the story of their meeting while Ty remained quiet, peering around the office. He seemed suddenly very young, and Sophie realized she’d had an extra day to contemplate the idea of losing her parent. She’d already grieved the loss of another. Without thinking, she reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze, and he squeezed back. He straightened in his seat, and they took a collective breath.

Cody held a file in his hands. “We have things to tend to. The will, the estate, his wishes, all those things. We’ll get to all that. But first…” He pulled two sealed envelopes from the file and placed the file on the desk. “First, you might like to read the letters he wrote to each of you.”

Sophie reached for the offered envelope with a trembling hand, broke the seal, and slid out a single sheet of cream parchment. In her peripheral vision, she saw that Ty held a similar sheet, a letter, in her father’s handwriting. Her father had held this sheet of paper in his hands.

She began to read.

My darling Kipper…

The breath left her. Kipper. Her dad’s pet name for her, earned on a family vacation to the Jersey shore when she was nine. As her mother napped, father and daughter sat on a pier and fished, a pastime he claimed to love as a teenager. They used kippers for bait, tiny silvery fish, slippery to the touch.

“They’re small and mighty, like you,” Hank had quipped. And the name had stuck.

Sophie took a deep breath and began again.

My darling Kipper,

If you’re reading this version, it means I never worked up the nerve to tell you about Ty, and that’s a shame. It’s my plan to do so, and I’ve come close so many times, but it never seemed right. You had med school, then your mom’s death, then your residency…but no. In the end, it’s my cowardice alone that is responsible for you learning the truth from my written words and not my spoken ones.

To understand Ty, I need to explain his mother, Jane. I’ve come to accept that your mom and I never quite fit. I met her on the rebound, flat broke and reeling from heartbreak. Your mom was self-sufficient, sensible, orderly, capable. She righted my ship. She saw my potential. I was in debt to her, and that was my undoing, for I never could be the kind of man that was right for her. We flared out quickly, but by then we were committed.

I met Jane at a low point. She played piano at the jazz club down the street from our Boston offices. She was different from your mom in every way. Creative, carefree, quick with a joke. I fell hard, and we went on for a couple of years. Your mom never knew.

Jane did not tell me about Ty. One day she stopped playing piano at the club and stopped returning my calls, wouldn’t answer the door. She called it off. I eventually got over it.

When Ty found me, I was shocked. But he’s a great kid, and we’ve accepted each other. I’ve not gone around his mother, but he’s on his own now. I attended his high school graduation. I taught him to play golf, always waiting for the right time to tell him about you. Then your mom passed, and it seemed too much. He asked about my family, his family. I told him I was a widower. A half-truth.

I’m not proud of what I did. But I’m proud of Ty, and I hope to make him proud of me someday. I hope the same of you.

Kipper, there’s a few important thoughts I want to leave with you.

1.     Never let anyone talk you into a relationship if you don’t feel love flowing from the deepest core of yourself.

2.     My marriage was a mistake. You were not.

3.     I love you more than life itself. I know I have not expressed this to you throughout your life, but I’m trying to show you now.

4.     If I could do it all over, I would have the great fortune and wisdom to walk beside you throughout your life, my Sophie Henrietta. To not have done so is my deepest regret.

Love Always,

Dad

Sophie lowered the page to her lap as tears streamed down her cheeks. She glanced at Ty, who sat bent with his elbows on his knees, staring down at the letter in his hands. He released it, letting it flutter to the floor, and hitched a sob. Rising, Sophie brushed her tears away and rested a hand on his shoulder. His hand rose to cover hers, and they stayed like that, loving a flawed, beautiful human who had bowed out of their lives just when they’d begun sharing a stage.

Hank was gone. Ann was gone.

But as Ty patted her hand, then stood and smiled at her, that sweet, crooked grin, a warmth suffused her, a joy she had never felt.

Sophie was finally home. And that home had a name.

Brother.