Chapter 4: What My Children Didn't Know
My daughter's name is Patricia.
She is forty-nine years old and she has her father's eyes and my stubbornness, which is not always a comfortable combination.
She drove over within the hour.
I had the journal and the letter on the table when she arrived.
She sat down across from me without taking off her coat, which meant she was ready to leave quickly if she needed to.
"Tell me what's in it," she said.
"Read it yourself."
She looked at the journal.
She didn't reach for it.
"Mom.
His family was awful to you at the funeral.
His nephew practically accused you of forging the marriage certificate."
"I know what they said."
"And now you're sitting here alone with whatever he left you, and you won't tell me what it is on the phone." She leaned forward.
"What does it say?"
"It says he never stopped loving me."
Patricia sat back.
"It says he left when we were young because he thought he was dying and he didn't want me to watch it happen." I kept my voice level.
"He survived.
He came back.
I was already engaged to your father.
He turned around and went home."
She was quiet for a moment.
"He kept a photograph of me," I said.
"From when I was eighteen.
He carried it for fifty-five years."
"Mom—"
"He called me because he was dying again.
For real this time.
And he said he had one last favor to ask." I folded my hands on the table.
"He didn't want to die without telling me the truth.
He wanted me to know, before he was gone, that leaving me was the worst thing he ever did.
And that he had spent his whole life knowing it."
Patricia looked at the photograph, still lying beside the journal.
She didn't say anything.
"He asked me to marry him," I said, "so that I would have legal access to what he left.
His family would have contested everything otherwise.
You know they would have."
"What did he leave?"
"I don't know yet.
The attorney is coming Thursday."
She pressed her lips together.
"His nephew called me this morning."
I looked up.
"He said that whatever Thomas left, it belongs to the family.
He said if you try to claim anything, they'll challenge it in court." She met my eyes.
"He used the word 'fraud,' Mom."
The word landed quietly between us.
"His name is Gerald," I said.
"He was at the funeral.
Standing near the door."
"He called himself the estate representative."
"Thomas never mentioned him.
Not once in seventeen days."
Patricia picked up the photograph.
She looked at it for a long moment — me at eighteen, standing in front of my parents' house, not yet knowing what was coming.
"You really had no idea," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"None."
She set the photograph down carefully.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to meet with the attorney on Thursday."
"And if Gerald shows up?"
I looked at the journal.
At the unsteady handwriting in the final entry.
At the line Thomas had pressed hardest of all, the one about being a coward, the one I had read four times now.
"Then he shows up," I said.
Patricia was quiet for a moment.
Then she stood, finally took off her coat, and draped it over the back of the chair.
"I'm staying for dinner," she said.
She walked to the kitchen and put the kettle on without asking.
May you like
I looked back at the journal.
Thursday felt very far away.
