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“I guess I don’t understand,” he finally said. “Your mother…never told me. I never knew I had another son…”
“You still don’t know that,” Seth said.
“My mother died in December,” I explained, steamrolling right over any sadness that threatened to seep in. My grief had no place in tonight’s discussion. “She left a letter for me that revealed the secret she’d kept for my entire life—the name of my father.” I nodded once at Simon.
“Why would she keep that from you?” Hayden asked, her voice teeming with emotion.
I inhaled slowly, gathering my composure, because even with several months to work through this, even after reading her reasons, I still hadn’t made peace with my mother’s decision all those years ago.
“I only know what she said in her letter,” I said quietly, hoping we were indeed alone on this patio. The news would travel through town fast enough as it was, but I’d prefer that didn’t happen until the Henrys were ready to talk about it.
“Tell us,” Hayden said. “What did her letter say?”
I did my best to keep my voice neutral, like a narrator talking about someone else’s crazy background. “She said she met you”—again, I nodded to Simon—“at a convention for the company she worked for. The companyyouworked for.”
“In Houston,” Simon said. “It was early summer, already sweltering there.” He frowned. “Nita and I were going through a rough patch. We’d broken up that spring,” he explained in a rush with a glance around the circle. Nita was the late mother of my four younger half-siblings.
“My mom mentioned that,” I said, “so you must have told her.”
Simon nodded. “We…connected for that short interval of time. Spent the weekend together.”
“We don’t need details of that, Dad,” Hayden said with a plea in her voice.
He let out a halfhearted chuckle and shook his head. “Details will not be offered. I told Janet about Nita, not because she needed to know but because I was confused about her. At the end of our weekend, Janet and I agreed not to stay in touch. There was no point. She lived in Texas, and I lived in Tennessee. We didn’t have email back then. No cell phones. You had to really want to stay in touch with someone…”
His story matched what my mom had told me.
I continued, “She found out she was pregnant and hired an investigator to track you down.”
“They couldn’t find him?” Holden asked. His wife, Chloe, held his hand. “Henry’s a pretty common name, I guess.”
“They found him,” I said. “Through his and Nita’s engagement announcement in the newspaper.”
Someone, maybe Everly, gasped.
“My mom made the decision to keep the news to herself. She didn’t want to shake up your future with your fiancée,” I said to Simon. “She moved to a management position at a competitor, so she made good money and didn’t have to travel much anymore. She decided to be a single mom, and that’s what she did.”
“She never got married?” Hayden asked.
“It was always just the two of us,” I answered.
“And she never told you who your father was?” Ava asked.
I shook my head. “When I was young, she told me some kids had two parents and some had one, and our family worked out that I had one parent. Eventually I wanted to know more, of course, and she told me she only ever knew my father’s first name and that there was no way to track him down.”
There was a collective silence again, and I could feel people judging my mother. I could understand it. I’d felt more than a little anger myself since finding out the truth, but that was mixed in with compassion and love and grief, because my history was her and me against the world. We were all the other had, as my grandparents had died when I was a toddler, and my mom had no siblings.
“But she decided to tell you everything in a letter?” Seth asked. I could hear the skepticism in his tone.
“That’s right,” I said. “She explained she went through periods of doubt my whole life, when she felt guilty that I didn’t have a father figure like other kids. When she realized she wasn’t going to beat the cancer, she knew she had to tell me the truth. She acknowledged in her letter she took the coward’s way out.”
“I’ll say,” Cash said. It was the first thing he’d uttered, and his tone wasn’t kind or understanding.
I couldn’t say I disagreed with him, but again the emotions I felt about my mom were a quagmire. She’d been a good mother, sacrificed a lot for me, so nothing was as clear-cut in my heart.
“Anyway, I found out, like I said, a couple of weeks after she died. I sat on it for a few months, trying to figure out what to do. I searched for you online”—I nodded to Simon again—“and learned you’d retired recently from the same company. I didn’t find much other information on you, but I did find Henry’s Restaurant and realized it was run by your sons. My half-brothers.” I swallowed hard, because emotion surged in my throat despite all my months of imagining this moment. “I’ve never had a family, ever. Just my mom. So while a part of me acknowledged it might be smart not to shake things up, a bigger part of me needed to at least meet you.”
“To hell with not shaking things up, I guess,” Cash muttered.
