She has called nine times and written twice. The letters are the same letter: that we do not know the whole story, that she raised us and fed us and kept a roof over us, and that Perry was not the man we think he was.
That last one is the only true sentence in either of them. He was not. He was a weak man who made a bargain that cost his children a mother and both of them a father, and he was also the man in the front row, and I have decided I am allowed to hold both of those without resolving them.
Fletcher has been more definite. He has not read the letters. He has told me twice that he is at peace with it and I believe him about eighty percent.
Ruth is eighty-four and lives with her other daughter now, in another county. We see her about every six weeks. We have forgiven her, which was easier than I expected once I understood that she was the second most frightened person in that house.
She told us, the last time, that in 2004 she nearly drove to Nesta’s apartment herself and did not, and that she has thought about it every year since.
Nesta and I have lunch about once a month.
It has not been a movie. It was awkward for the first four months and there are large parts of it neither of us knows how to do. She is not my mom. She is a woman who has had twenty-eight years of a specific grief and now has two thirty-one-year-old men in her life, and we are all working it out slowly and it is going fine.
Her daughter Wren is twenty-two and has taken to us like we’re a delivery she’d been expecting. She calls us her giant brothers. She came to Fletcher’s birthday in March.
Nesta told us one thing in the second month that I think about constantly.
She said she did not fight because she was told she would lose, and she believed it, and she was probably right, and that the thing that has ruined the last twenty-eight years for her was not the losing. It was that she agreed to the story. She signed a form that said abandonment and she has known every day since that two boys somewhere were being told it.
You’d be rotting in an orphanage if it weren’t for us.
Wanda said that to us, in one form or another, for the better part of eighteen years, and she said it to me at eighteen in front of twenty relatives while my grandmother sat at the head of the table with her hands flat on the cloth and my father’s letter in a shoebox eleven miles away.
There was never any orphanage.
There was a girl of twenty-two in an apartment in Cordwell who was told what would happen if she kept us, and there was a man who was already our father sitting in a front row for seven years pretending to be a good neighbor.
My adoptive mother spent twenty-eight years telling my brother and me how grateful we should be that she took us in. On her sixtieth birthday I let myself into her house with flowers — and heard her laughing in the kitchen about how we had believed every word she ever told us.
