Chapter 7: What Was Always True
We spent four days together in Portland.
He showed me the neighborhood where he'd grown up — the school, the park, the corner store that had changed hands three times but still sold the same brand of orange popsicles he'd eaten as a kid.
He showed me a photograph of his adoptive parents, both gone now, his father from a heart attack six years ago, his mother just last year.
"We're both orphans," he said.
Not sadly.
Just as a fact.
"We're both orphans," I agreed.
On the second evening, we sat on his apartment balcony with mugs of the coffee he'd made — and he was right, it was better, I didn't tell him that immediately — and he asked me something he'd been circling for days.
"Do you blame her?" he asked.
"Patricia."
I thought about it honestly.
"I used to," I said.
"For a long time, I had this version of her in my head.
The woman who just walked away.
Who decided we weren't worth staying for." I wrapped both hands around the mug.
"But then I read my dad's letter.
And I thought about what she must have been carrying.
She gave you up before she ever came to him.
She was very young.
She was scared.
And then she left again, and she spent the rest of her life regretting both of those decisions." I paused.
"I don't think she was a villain.
I think she was a person who made choices she couldn't undo, and she lived with that."
Daniel nodded slowly.
"I made peace with it a long time ago," he said.
"With her.
With not knowing.
I had good parents.
I had a good life." He looked out at the city.
"I just always felt like there was something unfinished."
"And now?"
He looked at me.
"Now it feels finished."
On the third day, I went with him to the hardware store for the morning.
I sat on a stool behind the counter and watched him work.
He knew every customer by name.
He remembered what they'd bought last time, what project they were working on, whether it had gone well.
A woman came in looking for a specific type of bracket for a fence repair.
He didn't have it in stock.
He called two other suppliers while she waited, found one that had it, and gave her the address without charging her anything for the time.
When she left, I looked at him.
"You do that a lot?" I asked.
"Do what?"
"Help people find things you can't sell them."
He shrugged.
"It's a small town.
People remember."
I thought about my father driving ninety miles.
"You're like him," I said.
"You know that?"
Daniel looked at me for a moment.
Then he went back to the inventory he'd been sorting.
But he was smiling.
On my last evening, we walked along the waterfront as the light went flat and orange over the river.
We didn't talk much.
We didn't need to.
At one point he said, "I want to come to Ohio."
"Yes," I said immediately.
"I want to see the house.
Where he lived."
"I'll show you everything.
The garage.
The photographs.
I still have the hard hat."
He nodded.
We walked a little further.
"Jess," he said.
"Yeah?"
"I've been thinking about what she said.
What Patricia told him." He looked at the river.
"She said you deserved to know you weren't alone in the world."
"Yes."
"She was right," he said.
"But I think she was also talking about herself.
I think she needed to know that she hadn't left two people with nothing.
That there was still something she could do, even at the end."
I thought about that.
"Maybe," I said.
"It doesn't make everything okay," he said.
"But it makes it something."
The river moved.
The lights on the far bank came on one by one.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?"
"For picking up the phone."
He laughed — a real laugh, easy and warm.
The first time I'd heard it full and unguarded.
"You called me," he said.
May you like
"You answered."
He put his arm around my shoulders briefly, the way a brother does, easy and without ceremony, and we stood there watching the river until it was too cold to stay.
