I was sitting with a yearbook and a list of kids in my classes, matching names and faces, when the phone rang.

I got up slowly, walked to the phone slowly, and answered on the third ring, as was my custom when answering telephones.

“Hello,” I tried to say casually. No answer. “Hello?”

“Rick, is it really you?”

“Yes, Janet,” I said calmly.

“Good,” she replied in an equally serene voice. “Because I need to tell you what a bastard you are.” I didn’t bother to contradict her. “Do you want to know what happened to me when my parents found out I was pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“They told me that if they hadn’t adopted me, they’d’ve disowned me. They couldn’t believe that I would have thrown everyone that they’d given me back in their faces. Their advice, their love, that they took me as their own child! They told me that they wouldn’t pay for college anymore. I was going to go to Northwestern, Rick! Even with the scholarships I got, I didn’t have that kind of money. And then—“

I decided to interrupt before this got completely out of hand. “Janet, you’re talking to me as if this is all my fault.”

“This is all your fault, Rick.”

“It takes two people to have sex, Janet.”

“You pressured me into it.”

“We were both drunk as hell,” I said in a cold voice. She shut up. “We were both drunk as hell, Janet, and I seriously doubt that you were thinking clearly when we were in the car together. I know I wasn’t.”

“Still,” she pleaded in her teenage girl voice, “if you knew about all the things I had gone through…I went to community college.” I sighed. “I started at the bottom, and it’s taken so long to get to this meager position I’ve got…”

I cut her off again in that cold voice. “You know perfectly well that you could have asked for monetary aid from me, since I’m the father. I’m not really sure why you didn’t. Was it pride? Or did your parents forbid you? Or was it something else?”

“I thought I still loved you, Rick. I didn’t want to keep you tied down. You were going to college on the West Coast, and I didn’t want to take that away from you.” She said that in a hushed voice, almost a whisper.

“Then you were a fool not to ask me to marry you, or do something else that would have let you shoulder the burden with someone else. Did you ever get married?”

“No, but…but Rick…”

“You didn’t do anything to help yourself out. Just because you wanted to feel like you were a martyr. Because you wanted to feel like you were all alone. You wanted to cling to your misery instead of doing something about it.”

“Damn it, Rick, I’m not listening to any more lectures, much less from the man who got me pregnant. Listen to what I’m about to say. This is the only reason I even called.

“Stay away from my daughter. You keep away from Elizabeth. I know there’s no way to get her out of your homeroom, and that there’s only one advanced history class. She wants to be in that class very badly, and I won’t take that from her. But you make sure that you don’t get close to her.”

Incredulous, I shouted, “Janet, she’s my daughter! And she still doesn’t know who the father is!”

“I don’t want her to know.”

“She needs to find out sometime! She can’t go her whole life not knowing, damn it!”

“Stay away from her, Rick.” I heard the click, and suddenly I felt like breaking things.