I Left My Heart in San Diego

CURRENT STORY DATE: 07/11/11

I was holding Cadence, just bouncing her as she made gurgling noises like babies do. I skillfully pulled my phone out of my pocket as I felt it start to vibrate, and saw I was being called. I was confused, though, when I saw it was Zie and not my father. "Zie, hold on for two seconds," I said, placing my phone down on the table. I kissed Cadence's forehead and placed her back in her car seat, then picked my phone up off the table and held it to my ear. "Hi, sorry about that, I had to put Cadence down. What's up?"

"Arizona!" Zie squealed.

"What??" I asked.

"I just got a call from Tre," she said.

My jaw dropped open, and I glanced up as I heard the door to the cafe open. It was a man and a woman, he probably in his mid-forties, and she probably in her late thirties, and I saw the man scan the cafe. He was looking for someone, and I saw his face light up when his eyes landed on me. It was my father and step-mom. I waved over at him, and he grinned, turning back to his wife and beckoning she follow him. "And? What did he say?" I asked Zie, turning back to my conversation. My father waved to me, grinning widely as he let his wife sit down before him. I grinned widely back at him, and mouthed a hello before pointing to my phone and holding up a finger.

"Well, he just called to say, and ask how much I was missing him yet," Zie answered, chuckling.

"Aww," I cooed. "Did anything come up about...y'know?" I alluded.

"That's what I meant to call you about," Zie said.

I gasped, making my father smile. I saw him say something quietly to his wife, and she smiled as well, looking at me. I smiled at her and the smile she had stayed on her face. "You told him??" I asked incredulously.

"Yes!" Zie squeaked.

"And what did he say? How did he react?" I pried.

"Well, I told him that I had something to tell him, and he asked what it was. I took a deep breath and told him not to, like, freak out or anything, he hurriedly agreed because he was very eager to know what I had to tell him, and then...I told him. I said to him straight-out, "I'm pregnant."," Zie explained.

"Oh my God!" I squealed. "And how did he react??"

"He was ecstatic! He said, 'Zie, baby, that's amazing!! Are you just figuring it out?' And then I told him, no, I had known for a little while and I just didn't know when to tell him, and he asked how long I had known, and I said about a month, and he was freaking the fuck out, Ari, it was actually pretty funny. But yeah, I told him, and I just feel so...up on Cloud 9 that I had to tell someone!"

"Well, I'm glad that you chose me to talk to. Listen, though, I'm actually at lunch with my dad, so I'll talk to you later, okay?" I said.

"Yeah! You tell me how everything goes when you get back!" she said.

I laughed. "I always do, darling. I'll talk to you later."

"Bye!" Zie said, and hung up. I shoved my phone back in my pocket and looked up at my dad, seeing his wife smiling widely at Cadence. I smiled and looked back over at my dad.

"Arizona," he said.

"Dad," I said, my eyes starting to brim with tears. We both stood up and enveloped each other in one of the biggest hugs I have ever received in my entire life. I swear we were wrapped around each other for at least five minutes.

When we finally pulled apart, we were both crying, and then we both laughed as my dad wiped away my tears and then his own. As he sat back down, his wife handed him a tissue out of her purse, and then handed me one. "Thanks," I said quietly, as I took the tissue from her and wiped my face off properly. Once our faces were dried and we were composed enough to speak, my dad says, "Please forgive my extreme rudeness, this is my wife, Morgana. Morgana, this is my daughter, Arizona."

"It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Everett has told me as much as he can remember about you ever since he got your message," she said, holding out her hand.

I shook her hand and smiled. "I would say the same, but yesterday was the first time I had even spoken to my father in almost eleven years."

Morgana laughed. "I understand. So, you and your father have a lot of catching up to do, huh?"

I chuckled and smiled over at my father. "Yeah, we really do. We might be here for a good couple hours."

Morgana smiled. "Well, I have no problems leaving Everett here, but I can only stay for a little bit. I have a meeting this evening that I need to get back for in time, as much as I'd like to stay and get to know my, well, stepdaughter."

I smiled at her. I liked her already. "Well here," I said, pulling my purse next to me from the edge of the seat of the booth. I wrote down my phone number on a Post-it note and stuck it to the table in front of Morgana. "That's my cellphone number. You can call me to chat whenever. Or you can text, if you're into that."

Morgana smiled again. "Thanks, Arizona. I'll see what's on my schedule after the school year starts, and perhaps I can peel away from my duties to come get to know you better."

"School year?" I asked.

"I'm a high school principal," she said.

My eyebrows shot up and I looked over at my dad. "Dad, you didn't tell me you had a top-shit wife."

Both my father and Morgana laughed, making me grin. "Well, that's enough about me! This lunch is supposed to be for your father and you," Morgana said.

My father smiled. "So, Arizona, tell me. Tell me about your life. Well, at least the most important points," he said.

I continued to grin. "Well...I'll start with middle school. It was kind of rough, and I had my friends and Mom to pull me through, but there were some times when I seriously considered committing suicide. Mom was amazing throughout the whole thing, like, this whole stage of my life brought her and I so much closer together, and I kind of feel bad about drifting apart from her again now that I'm married to a rock star and have a daughter, and have another kid on the way. She actually paid for me to see a therapist, and I was 13 and 14," I started.

My dad's eyes were wide as dinner plates and his jaw was practically on the table. "Well, that's one way to start off the conversation! Arizona, I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you. Did this continue into high school?"

I nodded. "Yup, I continued to see that therapist until I was 15. Two years until I was completely past my suicidal phase," I said.

"Wow," my dad said. "Just wow. So, what happened after that? Something happy, I hope?"

I chuckled and leaned over and took a whining Cadence in my arms. I started rocking her gently back and forth as I continued to explain the decade of my life that my father had missed. "Yes. After I had gotten over my suicidal thoughts and shit, pardon my French, I went on to excel throughout the rest of high school. I had my first boyfriend when I was a sophomore, and my first kiss, subsequently, and we ended up dating for around nine months."

"And how was your mom with this whole boyfriend business?" my dad asked warily.

I laughed. "Don't worry, Dad, Mom was definitely always wondering what was going on with that first boyfriend. Every time after he left the house, she would sit me down and make me tell her the gritty details of everything that we did, even if she was there to witness some of it, and she wouldn't let me leave the couch until I had told her the truth about everything. She was actually pretty strict about my boyfriends, especially in the beginning, but she softened up quite a bit once I turned 16 and 17, and knew what I was getting into with certain guys."

My dad smiled, chuckling a little. "Good. What happened next?"

"After that guy and I broke up, I was single for about four or five months before I started dating this guy named Charlie." I took a deep breath.

My dad looked at me, concerned. "I can sense things didn't go well with this Charlie."

I smiled briefly, remembering all the times Charlie and I had. "I had gotten really into art classes and things around this time in high school, I was at the end of my sophomore year, and I had a knack for drawing eyes. I met Charlie in one of my art classes in the second semester, and we started dating at the beginning of the last marking period. We dated for...a year and a half, and it did not end well."

"What happened?" my dad asked.

I took another deep breath. "I turned 16 shortly after Charlie and I started dating, and Charlie was a year older than me, so he thought he knew what was best for our relationship, but only after I turned 16. So, a week after my birthday, he tried to convince me to have sex with him." My dad raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes slightly. "Dad, nothing happened. That was our first fight. I told him I had just turned 16, and that I was nowhere near ready to have sex yet, and he came back with the fact that he was older, and that I should trust him because he knew what he was doing, and I just wouldn't have any of it, so we didn't talk for two weeks. After two weeks, he texted me one morning and apologized for being an asshole about trying to get me to have sex with him, and he didn't try again until around the end of our relationship. He was actually very understanding and respectful of me after that, which was why we stayed together so long.

"Over the course of our relationship, I had gotten deep into art classes, and he was the first guy I ever truly loved. He loved me too, so there was no rough ground there, and I had really gotten into drawing Charlie's eyes. There were days when he would come over the house or I would go over his, and I would bring my art stuff and we would just sit there and I would draw his eyes for hours. And then we would have some time for ourselves, of course, but those were good days."

"So what went wrong?" my dad asked.

"Well, in the middle of my junior and his senior year of high school, he started hanging out with these...kids, and they were very into drugs and violence and shit, and he once staggered over to the house at midnight, high off his ass, and tried to get me to have sex with him. I refused, of course, since I could smell the drugs on him about 10 feet away, but it took me about 2 hours to actually get him off of me and out of the house. Mom was...beyond pissed. She was fucking furious, and she didn't let Charlie back over the house ever again. Hell, every time I told her I was going over to his house, I had to give her a legitimate reason why I was going over there, because she absolutely hated him after the drug incident. Anyway, I think it was the last time I went over his house, like, ever, we got talking about the drugs and violence and shit, and we got into this huge-ass fight about it all, and we didn't talk for the rest of the week. On that Friday, in art class, I entered and I went up to him, and told him that I was done with all his drug shit, and that if he wanted to keep seeing me, he had to give it all up."

"What did he do?" my dad asked.

"He gave it up. He gave up the drugs and the violence. He wanted to stay with me, and that really proved something to me, so I think that's why we stayed together even after he graduated and left for college. We didn't stay together long after he went away to college, though."

"I assume something went wrong whilst he was there," Morgana said. She then nudged my father, asking him to move because she had to leave. "I'm sorry I have to leave, but you have to tell me the rest of this story some other time, Arizona."

I smiled up at her as she smoothed down her tight skirt. "Yeah, definitely. It was wonderful meeting you."

She smiled back at me. "You, too. I hope to continue this story very soon."

"Yeah, definitely," I said. "Goodbye!"

"Goodbye," she said to me, and then leaned down to kiss my father. She mumbled something to him I couldn't hear, then kissed him again before standing up and leaving.

I watched her walk out the door and looked back over at my father, his eyes slightly dreamy. "Anyway, I was going to say that yes, things went very wrong. You see, I was there to see Charlie off to college. He pulled me close, and told me that he had gotten Skype just so he could see me and talk to me at the same time whilst he was at college, but of course, he would call me too. And this ended up working out pretty well; we would call or Skype each other every other day, and tell each other stories of our days and stories about life at home still in high school and college respectively. One night, I guess he was drunk or something, he answered his Skype call, but there was someone in the room with him."

"Another woman?" my dad asked, a grimace starting to form on his face.

I shook my head, laughing lightly. "No, actually. Another guy. Charlie told me he had been experimenting whilst at college, and he said he actually liked fucking guys. At that, my heart was pretty much shattered, even if he was drunk, so I just signed off and cried myself to sleep for...hours. The next time I spoke with him was two days later, and I told him everything that he had done on our previous Skype call. He was appalled at himself, because he didn't remember any of it, and he tried to apologize, but I just told him that apologizing wouldn't make the fact that he ran around with another guy behind my back, let alone another woman, and that he didn't even have the common sense whilst shit-faced to not go on the computer okay. So I just told him that I was ending the relationship, and to have fun continuing to experiment whilst at college. And that was the end of that. I was a mess for the next month, and was just starting to recover when Mom told me that we were moving, and moving to Oakland, eight hours away from everything and everyone I had come to know and love."

"And that just sent you spinning back down into depression again," my dad said.

I shrugged. "Not really depression, more of rebellion. This is when I started drifting away from my mother and getting deep into the punk rock scene. I made a whole new group of friends and snuck out at night to go to punk shows, and then wouldn't return until four in the morning on school nights. And to this day, my mom still wonders why I slept through my alarm. Anyway, getting into the punk scene wasn't how I met Billie Joe," I explained.

"Billie Joe?" my dad asked.

I grinned. "That's my husband's name."

My dad now smiled. "And how did you meet him, then?"

I grinned widely at the memory. "When Mom and I were moving into the new house here in Oakland, he actually came up and said hi, because he lives in the cul-de-sac that we live on the street part of."

"And how did you start dating?" my dad asked.

I giggled. He still could be my father after all these years apart. "He climbed into my window later that morning and invited me to his band practice, and therefore his house, so I stayed there for a while, and after about a day of kissing and canoodling in his bedroom, he asked me to be his girlfriend."

"And his proposal?" Goodness, my father did not stop.

"Him and his two band mates got in a car accident during their tour of the West Coast, so when I went to see him in the hospital, he proposed to me. Of course, we have had our squabbles as well. Actually, after he proposed to me was when we had our first big fight. I was actually three months pregnant with this one here when it all happened," I explained, gesturing towards Cadence, who was now whining quite loudly. She was getting hungry. "I hope you don't mind if I pop out a boob. The little one is getting hungry," I added.

My dad shook his head and gestured towards the whining and squirming Cadence. "By all means," he said, and I smiled. I lifted up my shirts and let Cadence begin to suckle, earning myself a couple weird looks being only eighteen and having a baby suckle my breast in the middle of a restaurant.

"Anyway," I continued, hoisting Cadence up a little to give her a better angle as she grasped my breast with her tiny hands. I smiled as I watched her, then looked back up at my father. There was a sequence of me looking between my father and my suckling daughter as I spoke. "Billie confessed to having cheated on me pretty much right before he proposed to me. As in, he did the cheating right before he proposed to me, but I didn't figure it out for a couple of weeks. Of course, things worked out because we're married now, but it was definitely a test of the relationship. And then, things just happened to work out the way they are, because I'm married to a rock star, and I have his beautiful daughter, with another child on the way."

My dad raised his eyebrows and his eyes got very wide. "Say again?"

Cadence detached from my breast, and I let my shirts down. There were a few moments of silence before I spoke again. "I'm married to the lead singer and guitarist of a semi-famous punk band, I have his daughter, and I'm pregnant again," I repeated, slowly.

"WOW!" my dad exclaimed, leaning back against the cushion of the back of the seat of the booth. "So this is my granddaughter," he said, gesturing towards her.

"Mhm," I said. "Her name is Cadence. Cadence Aleah Armstrong. Would you like to hold her?"

My dad grinned and nodded vigorously. I smiled and got up, handing over my daughter to my biological father. He took her in his arms and bounced her a couple times, getting her to look up at him. "Hi," he cooed softly. "I'm your other grandpa. It's nice to meet you."

I smiled watching my father with my daughter. "And don't worry, you'll get to meet your other grandchild when I have it," I said.

My dad looked up at me. "I'd really like that, Arizona." I smiled again, and let my dad hold my daughter before he gave her back to me. I continued to smile as he transferred her back to my arms, and he watched me a moment before saying, "You're gonna make an amazing mother."

"Thanks, Dad. I can only hope that Cadence will see enough of her dad. I think Billie has the same worry, especially since I'm pregnant again and Cadence is only three months old. And that was one of the other guys' girlfriends I was on the phone with when you came in, telling me that she told her boyfriend that she's pregnant."

"Shit, Arizona! I really need to keep up with you, which I can tell is going to be fucking hard. You're married, have a three-month-old daughter, and are pregnant again, all before you turn nineteen. You've basically condensed about five years into under one," my dad said.

I laughed. "Yeah, it's been crazy, but good crazy, like I said on the phone."

My dad smiled. "Well that's good. You certainly have a lot going on. You ever gonna go to school?" he asked.

I shrugged, placing Cadence back down in her little car seat. "I dunno. I mean, I've certainly thought about it, but how much would I actually pay attention if I went now? I have a three-month-old daughter and am pregnant again."

My dad smirked. "I didn't mean now, Arizona, I meant in the future."

I chuckled, embarrassed slightly. "Oh, well, in that case, I might go back to school when the kids are old enough to be in school themselves and I can secure someone to look after them while I'm in classes and Billie is working hard on his music or something."

"You'll figure it out. You've grown into quite the young woman, Arizona."

I smiled. "Thanks, Dad." I checked my phone for the time. "Oh shit! It's almost five o'clock! We've been here for three hours!"

"Have we?" he asked incredulously, checking his watch. "Well, whaddya know, we have. I best get going then. I have a bit of a drive back 'home.'"

I smiled, standing with my father and enveloping each other in another enormous hug. "We need to do this again sometime. This was fucking awesome," I said, after we pulled back from the hug.

"Yes, definitely. I will call you the next time I'm available, okay?"

I nodded. "Please do. I'll see you later, okay, Dad?"

He smiled. "Yes. It's been great to see you, Arizona. I love you."

I grinned and pecked my dad on the cheek. "It was great to see you, too, Dad. And I love you too."

"Bye, Arizona," he said, waving.

"Bye, Dad," I said, waving back as he walked away. I let out a long sigh after he left and had a smile that didn't leave my face for a very long time even after I got home.

Of course, when I did get home, my mother was coming down the stairs, looking very frantic. "Arizona! Where have you been all afternoon??" she shrieked.

"Calm down, Mom, I was just out."

"Out where? With whom??"

"Mom! Calm down! I was just at that new cafe that opened a few weeks ago."

"And who were you there with for three hours?"

I took a deep breath. "My father."