The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

The Drive Up My Road

He came on a Saturday three weeks later, driving his own truck the whole way from Dayton because he said he wanted the miles to think, and Kim came out to the farm that morning too, nervous in a way I had rarely seen her, straightening the kitchen three separate times though it had already been clean.

I stood on the porch when his truck turned up the gravel, and I will tell you honestly that my legs did not feel entirely like my own. He parked, and got out, and for one long moment we simply stood there looking at each other across the yard, a woman of sixty six and a man of forty eight who shared a face in ways neither one of us could have described but both of us saw instantly. He has my mother’s chin. He has, Kim told me later, laughing through tears, my exact habit of tucking his lower lip in when he is thinking hard about something, a thing I never knew I did until I watched him do it on my own porch.

Neither one of us ran. We are not people built for running toward each other across a yard like something out of a movie. We walked, slow, and when we finally stood close enough, he said, “Hi, Mom,” quiet, almost like a question, testing whether the word belonged to him to use.

I did not have words ready. I only put my arms around him, and he put his around me, and we stood like that a long while in the gravel drive while Kim stood on the porch with her hand over her mouth, crying the way she almost never does, and the wind moved through the cornfield behind us the way it has moved through that field every September of my whole life.

“I’m sorry it took forty eight years,” I finally said into his shoulder.

“You’re here now,” he said. “That’s the part that counts.”