The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

He said he had sent off one of the mail order ancestry kits almost a year ago, more out of curiosity than anything, and it had turned up a second cousin in Nebraska who was deep into her own family tree. He said the two of them had spent months trading messages and old family group sheets and county records until the branches came together on a line that led, eventually, to a girl named Arlene Dillard who had a baby boy in Des Moines in the spring of 1978 and placed him for adoption through a Lutheran agency.

He knew my maiden name before I ever told him a thing. He knew the year. He knew the agency.

He said he was not writing to ask me for anything. He said his life had turned out good, that he had a wife named Janet and two children, a boy and a girl, that he taught shop class at the high school in a town outside Dayton and coached the junior varsity wrestling team on the side, and that the only thing he wanted, if I was willing, was to know who I was, and maybe, someday, to meet me.

He left a phone number at the bottom of the page.

I sat with that letter a long time before I moved. The clock over the stove ticked through most of an hour. I did not call the number. My hands were not steady enough to hold the phone, let alone dial it, and some part of me, the part that had kept this quiet since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, was not ready to turn a secret into a voice on a telephone that fast.