The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

The Voice on the Phone

He answered on the third ring, and when I said my name was Arlene, there was a silence on his end of the line long enough that I thought the call had dropped.

“I’ve been hoping you’d call,” he finally said, and his voice broke a little on the last word, and mine did too, and for a minute neither one of us said anything else at all, just two grown strangers who shared a history neither one of us had chosen, breathing on either end of a phone line that stretched from Iowa to Ohio.

We talked for almost two hours that first call. He told me about Carl and Jean, how good they had been to him, how Carl had taught him to weld in that same shop building where he now teaches, how Jean used to say a prayer over him every single night before bed even after he was far too old for it, because she said a prayer never hurt anybody and might help. He told me about Janet, his wife, a nurse, and his daughter who was fourteen and already a better welder than half his students, and his son who was eleven and wanted to be a veterinarian.

I told him about Gordon, and about Kim, and about the farm, and about his grandfather and great grandfather who had worked this same ground before Gordon ever did. I told him, as gently as I knew how, about being eighteen and frightened and about the home outside Des Moines and the eleven minutes I had held him before they took him to the family who would raise him.

“I always wondered if you thought about me,” he said.

“Every single year on your birthday,” I told him, which was true. Every May the ninth of my life, for forty eight years, some part of my mind had gone quietly to a hospital room in Des Moines, no matter how busy the planting season or how loud the rest of my life had gotten.

“Mine too,” he said. “I used to ask my mom, my mom Jean, if she thought you ever thought of me. She always said a mother never stops.”

We agreed, by the end of that call, that he would come to Iowa.