I respond to Susan, “I’d be happy to help as much as I can. My dad is from Arkansas. His mother’s side of the family spent several generations in Randolph County. When I searched for information on your mother, I found her in Craighead, Arkansas. That’s where my family is from. (Which makes sense since we are looking for a common ancestor.) Let me do some looking through my files, and I’ll get back to you.”
The appeal of a family mystery taunts me, but I have other things to do. Laundry. Shopping. Dishes. Not interesting things, like a lost grandfather hunt, but they still need to be done. And as soon as I finish all the household chores, I have to work on my latest novel. The big science-fiction convention is next month, and I still have to prepare two presentations, research agents, and order all my normal author supplies before then.
I shower, dress, make the bed, and put the first batch of clothes in the washer. Then I start on the grocery list. As busy as I’m going to be this week, I consider stocking the freezer full of the usual fast-and-easy menu items. The top of that list would, of course, be corn dogs and cheap frozen burritos. But I did that last week, and growing children need good, nutritious meals that include plenty of lovely, fresh vegetables . . . or so I’ve heard.
The house phone rings, saving me from making any difficult food decisions for another few minutes. It’s my brother Mark.
“Hey, Randy. I’m going back to school to earn my nursing license,” he says. “By the time I graduate, the kids will all be out of the house. Then I can work anywhere in the country as a traveling nurse. Jana and Cheryl are thinking about doing it as well.”
Cheryl is Mark’s wife. She was best friends with Jana in high school. All three of them are close. Closer than I am to anyone in the family, but that’s probably due to Mark and Jana being so near in age and having gone through the family experience together. The age gap between us always put me one life stage ahead of them. I was grown and out of the house before they entered high school.
“Great,” I say, putting as much sarcasm into my answer as I can muster. “I can see the three of you at Christmas, sitting around Jana’s kitchen table, talking about who saw the most gruesome injury in the last month. That should put a pleasant, warm holiday touch to our family get-togethers.”
Mark laughs. “I thought you might appreciate it. Anything to help a brother.”
“Thanks,” I say. “If I can ever find out what gives you the creeps, I can return the favor.”
The phone is silent.
I wait a few seconds before asking, “Mark, are you there?”
“Yeah. I was just wondering if you’ve heard anything from your family back East?”
“I exchange emails with my sister Tammy. And my little brother Joe has sent me a few texts over the phone. I haven’t had any contact with my biological father. Or my other brother Bill.”
“Your brothers are Joe and Bill?” Mark laughs again. “That’s hilarious.”
“I thought so too,” I tell him. “But where Dad has a Joe and a Bill for brothers, I have a Bill and a Joe. Bill is the oldest of the two in my set of siblings.”
“Is he older than you?”
“No,” I say. “I remain the old man. I’m older than all my siblings. At least, all the siblings I know about.”
“The reason I called,” says Mark, “is I wanted to make sure you’re all right. Jana and I were talking about the situation, and we don’t want you to feel as if anything has changed with our family. Dad and all of us have always loved you, even though you were the milkman’s son.”
Mark’s comment hits me like a twenty-pound bowling ball. It doesn’t make any sense for him to tell me they have always loved me when we only found out that I was the milkman’s son a couple of months ago. But maybe I’m reading more into what he said than is really there.
“What do you mean?” I ask, confusion swirling inside my head. “I only sent in the DNA test a couple of months ago. Why wouldn’t you have loved me before then? Nobody knew I was really the milkman’s son.”
“Well, we kind of did.”
What! A mixture of emotions competes for my attention, but anger flares to the top.
“And no one told me?”
“We didn’t want to upset you,” says Mark. “We thought it would hurt your feelings.”
“But teasing me about it for years was all right?” My voice rises. “Where was your concern about my feelings then?”
“See? This is what we were worried would happen,” says Mark. “You’re upset.”
“Of course I’m upset,” I respond sharply. “I just found out that the rest of the family withheld a secret from me. My secret. Something I deserved to know. I have a right to be upset about this.”
“Jana and I didn’t actually know,” says Mark. “We only suspected Dad wasn’t your biological father. We didn’t know for sure until you took the test. That’s why Dad didn’t want you to do it.”
“Dad knew too?”
Mark snorts one of those duh-snorts. “Yeah. We’re not stupid. You don’t look like anyone else in the family. We did the math. And so did Dad.”
My mouth hangs open. I didn’t think it was possible to have the floor fall out from underneath me a second time—on the same topic. But it has. Mark, Jana, and Dad apparently discuss this when I’m not around. It looks like the joke was on me all along.
“You knew all along, and nobody told me,” I say.
“We didn’t want this to bother you,” says Mark. “It doesn’t matter to us. You’re still our brother. We love you the same way. And what if we had told you our suspicions and it turned out we were wrong?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” My hand lowers the phone toward its cradle, jerking the receiver back up at the last second. I croak out, “I love you, too.”
This hits me harder than finding out Dad isn’t my dad, even though it shouldn’t. The first discovery changed the perspective of my entire life. Another set of family was plopped right into my lap. New relationships sprang up, and the question of whether to accept these strangers into my life, into my heart, had to be made. That’s big.
But news of my family keeping me in the dark about this strikes at the very center of my insecurities. The fear of the milkman’s child is being different from the others. To not fit in with the rest. Mark and Jana have always been close, making me feel like an outsider in my own family. Their secret . . . my secret, pushes me even further outside the intimate family circle to which I don’t belong. To keep my own secret from me, as their private little joke, makes me feel more than ever before like the milkman’s son.
Who do I turn to in this emotional crisis? Where do I go to seek solace? In the past, Jana was always willing to listen to my problems, but she’s in on the joke. She’s one of the insiders. I can’t go to her, and if I did, she would only laugh. Now I see why everyone found the situation so funny. And for the first time, the barbs of the milkman taunt have the power to harm me. They isolate me. They show me how very alone I am.
Maybe helping Susan isn’t such a good idea after all. I certainly don’t want to open the doors of rejection and heartache to her. Especially knowing how it feels.
Anger struggles to take emotional center stage but is unable to break through the shell of sorrow that has encrusted me. “This is my life,” Anger reasons. “I deserve to know the truth. Good or bad, happy or sad, it is my right to know something this important. It was wrong to keep it from me. It was a greater wrong to turn it into a joke.”
I cannot deny the arguments Anger gives me. The choking tendrils of isolation are too strong to ignore. What do I do next? How can I make the hurting stop? I want to call one of my family and seek their help, but that will do no good in this situation. Either they are one of the insiders or they lack the level of empathy I need at the moment.
I should go to a movie.
Th
at isn’t going to solve my problem, but it will temporarily drown out the voices in my head. I can bury my emotions for a short time by immersing myself into the sensory overload that is theater entertainment. The vibrations of a supercharged sound system. The soft relaxation of sitting in reclining easy chairs. The pervasive smell of popcorn. And either the bliss of masterful storytelling or the horrible dagger to my brain that is a poorly executed script.
With summer just a few weeks away, there is a decent selection of movies. I decide on the only science-fiction offering they have and drive to the theater. The aroma of freshly popped popcorn hits me as soon as I enter. My eyes are so busy checking out the movie posters that I barely notice the doorman as he tears my ticket.
“Theater seven is on your left,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say and then shuffle over to the concession stand. I order a large soda, a small popcorn, and a box of Hot Tamales. It takes me five minutes to reach theater seven. Posters for upcoming movies keep grabbing my attention.
Baywatch. A remake of The Mummy. And Wonder Woman. I allow the mixed bag of reactions to occupy my mind. How many pirate movies are they going to make? I picture a white-haired, wrinkled Johnny Depp using a cane to shuffle across the deck of his ship and decide I would probably watch that. I know I could write a hilarious script about Captain Jack Sparrow as a senior citizen on one last adventure. Hopefully, someone else can do the same.
I take my seat just in time for my favorite part of the movie-going experience—the sneak previews. Thor: Ragnarok gets a thumbs up from me as I toss a handful of popcorn in my mouth and enjoy the buttery goodness of fluffy carbs. Trailers for remakes of Blade Runner and It fail to ignite my fires of interest. Then again, I rarely enjoy remakes. A classic is a classic for a reason. The successful combination of script, actors, and a director with a solid vision cannot be duplicated just because Hollywood has run out of original ideas.
A couple of Hot Tamales go into my mouth during the trailer for Justice League. The sweet cinnamon taste of the candy is extra good after the salty flavor of the popcorn. I don’t know the science behind alternating between salty and sweet for an extra amazing level of flavor, but popcorn and Hot Tamales is my favorite combination for that particular gastronomical experiment.
Popcorn. Hot Tamale. Groan at the horribly cheesy dialogue. Take a drink of my not-nearly-large-enough soda. Wonder what the writer was thinking when he/she wrote the script. I repeat the routine a couple of dozen times before the credits roll. I leave the theater, thinking of ways to fix the numerous plot holes in the story. Halfway home, I decide the movie is beyond reasonable efforts to salvage and give up.
As soon as I stop complaining to myself over the choice of viewing entertainment, thoughts of my siblings return. The feelings are not as strong as they were before the movie. My anger has been downgraded to a low simmer. They shouldn’t have kept me in the dark about having a different biological father. No matter what their motives, it was a part of my life they kept from me.
I phone home and tell the kids I’m stopping for pizza. They cheer. That’s another meal I don’t have to cook and they don’t have to eat. In other words, a win-win situation. My wife is home by the time I arrive. I set the pizzas down, give her a kiss, and then holler for the children to come eat.
“Let’s go to Florida for our anniversary,” says LuAnn.
“You mean, let’s go see the new grandbaby,” I tell her.
“Maybe.”
She doesn’t fool me. Twenty years of marriage has taught me a thing or two about how my wife thinks. Our anniversary is more of an excuse to travel than it is a desire to celebrate many successful years of marriage. She sees me every day, but this will be the first chance she has to see our newest grandchild.
“Okay,” I tell her. In my sour mood, I don’t really care. “We can do that.”
I load my plate with pepperoni pizza, apologize for not having dinner with the rest of the family, and then head to my office. Taking the time to visit with the family during meals is important to me, but when I’m in a mood like I am today, it’s better if I don’t.
Between bites of extra-cheesy goodness, I navigate to my Ancestry account. My fingers act on their own while my mind still broods about the earlier conversation with Mark. I open the DNA tab and stare at my Ethnicity Estimates just to have something to look at while I eat. A new color has been added to the map.
An orange blob covers Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. It’s listed as the Delmarva Peninsula Settlers—an area settled by immigrants from Germany, Wales, and Ireland. Pretty much the same nationalities I would have expected before I received my DNA test results. But these results have to represent my biological father’s side of the family.
I decide to work on Susan’s family mystery and check my inbox for her latest message. It has a list of family trees that share DNA with both her and the Lindsays. I look through the trees for familiar surnames.
The first account has no family chart connected to it but looks to be a close relative of both my dad and Susan. I notice the account hasn’t been active for a couple of years. Too bad. A quick message to the owner of the account might be all it takes to solve the mystery of Susan’s unknown grandfather.
Three of the remaining matches have no family names I recognize as being related to the Lindsays. There are two more with no family trees attached, but one of them lists a Byrd as the administrator of the account. Byrd is a family name in Arkansas.
The Byrds are part of the Williams line. They belong to Dad’s mother. I make a list of all the males that extend from Alonzo Williams who are approximately the same age as Susan’s grandmother and lived nearby. That leaves me with six names; three Williams, a couple of Spikes, and a Brown. Two of the men are six years younger than Susan’s grandmother, making them unlikely matches, but I include them anyway.
I compose a message with the names I found and where they lived around the time Susan’s mother was born. “Do you have any idea where I should be looking on my family chart, based on how distant the relationship is to my dad?”
That’s all I can do without more information. I send the message. The mystery of Susan’s grandfather is interesting, but not as exciting as the Great Lindsay Quest. I check the clock. It’s past my normal bedtime, so I shut down the computer and head to bed.
Jana calls in the morning. “How are you doing?”
“I’m all right,” I tell her. Suspicion prickles the back of my mind. First Mark, and now Jana. As close as the two of them are, they have to be up to something. At the very least, they’ve been discussing Mark’s conversation with me the day before.
“Have you spoken with your biological father yet?” she asks.
“No. He doesn’t have any memory of Mom and doesn’t think it’s possible for him to have a child he didn’t know about.”
“Don’t worry, he’ll come around,” she says.
My curiosity gets the better of me. “Did you know that Dad wasn’t my dad?”
There’s a pause. “Yeeesssss.” She draws out the word as if my question confuses her.
“How did you know?” I ask.
“You mean aside from the fact that you don’t look anything like the rest of us?” There’s a hint of laughter in her voice, reminding me of the milkman’s son comments I’ve lived with most of my life. “Really, it wasn’t that hard to figure out. You were supposedly born four months early. Except that you were a fat baby and premature babies are not fat.”
Her comment stops me cold. Why hadn’t that ever occurred to me? All my life I had been focused on the possibility of being adopted. My mind had never entertained the possibility that my mother had hooked up with someone before my Dad. “I never thought of that.”
“Duh.” Jana laughs. “You’re a guy. Guys don’t think that way. It never occurred to Dad either, until we told him. That’s okay. We still love you, even
if you aren’t the sharpest knife in the shed when it comes to babies.”
Oddly enough, I find her sarcasm comforting. It’s the same sort of humor she uses with Mark. It’s the same sort of humor she uses with Mom and Dad. And having her treat me the same way she does all the other members of the family feels good.
“That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me.”
Jana sighs. “Because we didn’t want this to happen. You’re upset about a stupid situation. It doesn’t change who you are or who you are to us. We just didn’t see the need to tell you about something that wasn’t important.”
“It’s important to my other family,” I say.
“Well . . . we didn’t know about them until after you sent in the DNA.”
“I’m still upset that you didn’t tell me.”
“You’ll get over it,” says Jana with a laugh. “You love us too much to stay mad. Mark and I just want you to know that we support you and hope that your new family loves you as much as we do. If not . . . they’re crazy.”
“Thanks.” I end the call.
I’m not as mad as I was yesterday, after talking to Mark, but the idea of my family keeping such an important suspicion from me is still upsetting. The urge to reach out to someone I trust returns. Then an idea flashes through my head. Why not reach out to Tammy? She’s my sister.
“I received calls from my brother and sister in Arizona,” I write. “They wanted to support me in this situation, but the reason I mention it is I found out my dad has known for a long time that I’m not his biological child. He loved my mom and decided to accept me as his own son. And he always has. What’s funny about the situation is I’ve been worried about how my dad would react when he already knew. I was worried about nothing. Life can be comical that way.”
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