Chapter 4: Thirty-Four Years of Questions
The tea went cold before anyone drank it.
I asked Dean to start from the beginning.
Not from eight weeks ago.
From before we met.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he told me.
Her name was Sandra.
They had met at a conference in the spring of 1998.
He was twenty-eight.
She was twenty-two.
It lasted six weeks.
He ended it because he said he knew, even then, that I was who he wanted.
He had come back to me and proposed three months later.
"You never mentioned her," I said.
"It didn't seem—"
"Don't say it didn't seem important."
He closed his mouth.
"Did you love her?"
He looked at the table.
"I cared about her.
It wasn't the same as what I felt for you.
But I cared about her."
I looked at Ethan.
"And she never tried to contact him?
In twenty-five years?"
"She said she decided it was cleaner not to." Ethan turned his mug in his hands.
He hadn't drunk anything either.
"She was proud.
She didn't want to be the woman who showed up with a baby and disrupted someone's life.
She said she told herself she was protecting everyone."
"And you?" I asked.
"Growing up — what did she tell you?"
"That my father didn't know about me.
That it wasn't his fault." He paused.
"I believed her.
I just — when she got sick, I needed to know for myself.
I needed to see him."
"Of course you did," I said.
Dean looked at me when I said that.
I wasn't saying it for him.
I was saying it because it was true.
"When she told you," I said to Dean, "eight weeks ago — what was the first thing you did?"
"I drove to her house."
"That same day?"
"Within an hour."
"And Ethan was there?"
"No.
Not that first time.
It was just Sandra and me." He exhaled slowly.
"She looked — she didn't look well.
She was sitting up in a chair by the window.
She apologized.
I told her she didn't need to.
We talked for a long time."
"About what?"
"About him." He glanced at Ethan.
"About what he was like.
What he'd studied.
Whether he was happy." His voice dropped.
"She showed me photographs."
Ethan was very still.
"She showed you photographs," I repeated.
"Yes."
"And you sat there looking at pictures of your son and you came home and you said nothing to me."
"Carol—"
"For eight weeks."
"I didn't know how to tell you something like that."
"You tell me." My voice stayed level.
"You sit me down and you tell me.
That's how."
He didn't argue.
There was nothing to argue.
I turned back to Ethan.
"Do you have brothers or sisters?"
"No.
Just me."
"Has she told you much about her life?
After?"
"Some." He smiled faintly.
It was a careful smile.
"She did well for herself.
She taught school for twenty years.
She has friends.
She's not — she didn't spend her life bitter about it, if that's what you're asking."
"It wasn't exactly what I was asking," I said.
"But I'm glad to hear it."
We sat in silence for a moment.
Then Ethan said, "Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Are you angry at her?
At my mother?"
I thought about it honestly.
"I don't know yet.
Ask me again in a week."
He nodded like that was a fair answer.
"I'm angry at him," I said.
"That I'm sure of."
Dean didn't flinch.
He just sat there and took it, which was the right thing to do.
"What happens now?" Ethan asked.
He looked between us.
"I'm not — I'm not here to break anything up.
I just wanted to know where I came from.
I just wanted to meet him."
"You've met him," I said.
"Yes."
I stood up and took the cold mugs to the sink.
I stood there with my back to both of them for a moment, looking out at the dark garden.
Then I said, "Come back on Saturday."
Neither of them spoke.
"Bring your mother if she's well enough." I turned around.
"I want to meet her."
Dean's face did something complicated.
Ethan looked at me like he wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.
"You want to meet her."
"Yes."
"Why?"
I picked up the letter from the table.
"Because she wrote me this letter when she didn't have to.
Because she told you the truth when it would have been easier not to.
And because she's your mother, and if you're going to be part of this family in any way, I'd like to know who she is."
The word *family* landed in the room like something fragile being set down.
Nobody broke it.
"Saturday," Ethan said quietly.
"I'll ask her."
He left twenty minutes later.
I watched his car pull away from the window.
Dean came to stand beside me.
"Carol—"
"Not tonight," I said.
"I need tonight."
He went upstairs.
I stayed at the window a long time, looking at the empty street where a young man with my husband's jaw had just driven away.
And I thought about Noah, sitting at his birthday table, looking toward the door.
May you like
Waiting for someone who didn't come.
I thought about that for a very long time.
