“I know it’s probably weird that I haven’t thought about it all that much,” I told Thad over the phone as I sat in bed after finishing watching some depressing Polish film about Czech male prostitutes in Prague because that’s what my life was now. That wasn’t what I was discussing with Thad though. “Don’t you think I’d wonder more about my dad than I have after all these years?”
            “I don’t think it’s weird.”

            “My mom told me he was a drunk and unreliable and so I guess I just kinda accepted that. Like, men, right? That’s just how they are.” I stared up at my ceiling and sank a hand into my slightly sweaty hair. “But now I’m wondering what he’s up to, you know? He was nineteen when he and my mom got together. Maybe he’s better now.”

            “Have you asked your mom?”

            “Hmm, she’s always so evasive about my dad. She clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and so maybe I picked that up and decided it didn’t matter.”

            “Maybe you could look him up on Facebook.”

            “That… is a great idea.” I pulled back my phone and navigated to my Facebook app. My mother had never been so evasive that I didn’t know his name, so I typed in Kent Fisher Montana. That ended up showing me men named Kent Montana, so I had to mess around with my search settings for a while. Thad was looking it up on his computer, too, but twenty minutes later, neither of us found anyone by the name of Kent Fisher in Montana. However, what I did find was a woman by the name of Zahra Fisher living in a place called Frenchtown, Montana, which was about fifteen miles outside of Missoula. And while she hardly had any content on her page, she did have one photo of her at a restaurant pointing to a pile of wings with the caption Thank you to Kent for introducing me to the American Chicken Wing, which is about 2% meat and 98% sauce. She was a pretty woman in her mid-thirties with lots of thick dark hair and a big smile, and because she was pointing to the wings with both hands, I saw that she had a wedding ring on one finger. Could he have remarried? The joke seemed to imply she wasn’t from the US, so I searched the name Zahra, which turned out to be Arabic.

            “Shit, Thad, what if I have other siblings I don’t know about?” I asked.

            “Does she have any baby photos on her page?”

            “Yeah.” I opened up the only one, which was of a newborn swaddled in a blue blanket attached to his birth announcement. Zahra had written, Welcome to the world, Charlie Hakeem Fisher! It’s been love at first sight!

            “Holy shit.” I sent Thad a link to her profile so that he could look at the pictures with me. “That photo’s two years old. Bet he’s a toddler now.”

            “Aww.” I rolled my eyes. The baby wasn’t that cute, but it would be like Thad to think so. “He’s got really dark curly hair. He could be your siblin’!”
            “My hair wasn’t dark when I was a kid. It was a lot lighter.”

            “Yeah, but this guy would have a different mom.”

            It was impossible to tell looking down at the baby’s red, wrinkled face. I only had a few pictures of my dad, so it wasn’t like I was familiar enough with him to see his features in a newborn.

            “Now what?” I asked, still scrolling through her pictures. There were only ten to choose from, and most were photos of mountains covered in snow. The only ones containing people were the one from the restaurant and the baby.

            “You could send her a message and ask if she’s married to Kent Fisher.”

            “Cuz that wouldn’t be weird or anything. I’m sure she wants to talk to her husband’s bastard child.”

            “It’s entirely possible she’s married to someone else who ain’t your father, Justin. How many Kent Fishers are there in this country?” He paused. “Sixty-two.”

            “You looked that up?”

            “Yeah.”

            Oh Thad. Where would he be without search engines to feed his constant thirst for knowledge?

            “So I highly doubt there are more than two Kent Fishers in a state with four people,” I said.

            “There aren’t four people in Montana. It’s more like…” Again, a pause. “One-point-oh-nine million people. So let’s see, sixty-two out of—how many people are in the US? Three-hundred–and-twenty-seven million. That means that the percentage of the US that is made up of people named Kent Fisher is—”

            “Thad, please don’t turn this into a math equation. I’m begging of you.”

            “I wanna know the probability of having two Kent Fishers in the state of Montana is.”

            “Do you have to subject me to this process though?”

            “You make it sound like torture.”

            “It sort of is.”

            Thad sighed heavily, and I heard some faint clicking in the background. He was still doing the math. What a weirdo. I almost laughed. I could barely get him to say the word dick over the phone but he’d whip his TI-84 graphing calculator out at the slightly provocation.

            “Wait, no,” Thad muttered to himself, and then I heard pencil scratching on paper.

            “Thad,” I said.

            “Hang on, this is more complicated than I thought. I’m trying to remember how we did this in my stats class. I’m going to Google this.”

            “Thad! I don’t need to know the probability of this. I really don’t.”

            “I know, but it’ll bug me if I don’t write this out.”

            “I wish you were this eager to conduct foreplay over the phone.”

            “Math is easier than foreplay.”

            “I can’t believe I’m dating you.” I sighed as Thad snickered. “Thad, help me with this!”

            “I am!”

            “No, you’re doing fucking statistics equations! Tell me what I should do.”

            “You should send her a message. I already told you that.”

            “Yeah, but it’d be weird.”

            “So? You are weird.”

            “Says the man currently figuring out the probability of having two Kent Fishers in the state of Montana.”

            “She seems nice. We don’t got much to go off of, but she don’t look like the kinda lady who would tell you to go jump off a bridge.”

            I turned back to the photo of her at the restaurant. She did look nice, but so did a lot of nasty people in the world. If I just friended her without an explanation, then that would be even creepier than a message. Did she know about me? I had my doubts. Kent hadn’t been in my life since I was an infant, and to me it sounded like he’d moved on entirely. Why bring me up? What would be the point?

            Maybe I could pretend to be an old friend. But that wouldn’t make any sense; he was twenty years older than me. Maybe the child of an old friend? Fuck. This felt too important to mess up.

            “How about I write a message and send it to you?” I asked Thad. “You tell me if it’s a good message or not.”

            Thad sounded vaguely amused when he replied, “Alright, sure.”

            “Call you back in twenty minutes.” I hung up, leaving him to his mathematical equations. I then started tapping out a message on my phone. Then deleted it. Then tapped it out again. Then deleted it.

            “God, fucking get it together,” I muttered, taking a deep breath. What I thought would take twenty minutes turn into a half an hour, then forty-five minutes. I couldn’t decide on how honest I wanted to be. If she knew about me, then she’d know I was lying. If she didn’t know about me, she’d freak if I told her the truth. Plus if her husband wasn’t my father, then I’d ruin some random man’s life by claiming to be an old love child.

            An hour later, I sent my message to Thad, then called him.

            “Justin, this is three sentences.”

            “Yeah, I couldn’t figure out what to say, so I elected to say hardly anything.”

            “I think it’s fine. Go ahead and send it.”

            “Okay.” I took a deep breath and navigated to the Facebook messenger app. I then pasted my message.

            Hello Zahra, I was wondering if you could help me out. I’m trying to find someone by the name of Kent Fisher for family research purposes, and I know he lived in the Missoula area about twenty years ago, so that’s where I’m searching for him now. Could you please tell me if the attached photo is one you recognize?

            I then attached the one photo I had of my dad in my phone—one of him holding me on an ugly plaid couch—and sent the message.

            “I did it,” I muttered.”

            “Good. I hope it gets you somewhere.”

            I bit my lip. If Zahra knew my dad and if she knew about me, she’d undoubtedly tell him I was looking for him. Then what? I hadn’t really thought about the consequences for this. Did I want to reconnect with a father who had failed me so completely that he hadn’t even bothered to contact me for over twenty years? What if he was still the unreliable drunk who had disappointed my mother so thoroughly that she hated to so much as mention his name? What if he was even worse than Stupid Gary?

            “Thad,” I said after a long silence.

            “Yeah?” he asked gently.

            “I shouldn’t have done this.”

            “Why not?”

            “I’m not ready for it.”

            Thad’s voice was soft and patient in his response. “You’re never gonna be ready for it, sweetheart.”

            I inhaled shakily as some tension left my body. “I guess not.”

***

            Two hours later, just as I was getting ready for bed, I got a text from Thad.

            The probability of there being two Kent Fishers in the state of Montana is roughly 1.566%.

            I couldn’t help but smile as I clicked off my lamp and huddled underneath my covers. I texted back ilu before turning off my phone. What a dork.