The woman knew my mother’s maiden name. She knew the street we lived on in 1979. When I asked how, she looked at my hands and said, “Because you have her hands.” Then she told me she’d been standing in that pharmacy every Thursday for six years, waiting for me to walk through the door. She said my mother had asked her to find me if she ever had the chance, but there was something she wasn’t allowed to give me until I was old enough to understand why my mother had left it behind.
She wrote an address on the back of her receipt and told me not to bring anyone with me. I’ve had that piece of paper in my wallet for two weeks, too afraid to look it up. This morning I finally did. It’s the house I grew up in. The house my mother sold before she died. I drove past it once and nearly kept going, but there was an elderly man sitting on the porch who looked straight at me and said, “You’re late. Your mother said you’d come after she was gone.” Then he reached inside his coat and pulled out an envelope with my name on it.
Inside was a photograph of my mother standing beside a woman I didn’t recognize. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, were seven words: “She knows what happened before you were born.” The woman from the pharmacy had followed me there. She stood beside my car, crying, and finally told me why she’d waited six years. She said my mother hadn’t died without telling anyone. She had spent her last week trying to make sure I would eventually find out who my father really was—and why she had lied about him for forty-seven years.
