…”Jared.”
The table went completely silent. Jared’s fork was halfway to his mouth.
“March ninth, 1999,” Uncle Teo said. “Lake Shore Drive, northbound, about a mile past Fullerton. Sleet. Your mother was twenty-two, and she flagged down my cab outside a laundromat. She told me she was going to her sister’s. Two miles later, she told me she was having a baby. I asked how soon. She said, ‘Now.'”
He took a sip of wine.
“I pulled onto the shoulder. I called 911 on a pay phone, because back then I didn’t have a cell. They said twenty minutes. You weren’t waiting twenty minutes. I had a clean towel in my trunk, and a dispatcher who stayed on with me through the cab radio. You came out yelling. You had a full head of hair, which I’ve always remembered, because it was so cold out there and I thought, at least this one’s got a hat.”
Jared slowly put his fork down. “My mom told me I was born in a cab,” he said. “She always said a cab driver delivered me. She said she never got his name.”
“She tried,” the old neighbor said. “She came back to the cab stand on Clark Street a week later with you in a car seat and a plate of cookies. Teo was out on a fare. She left the cookies and a note. I worked the stand with him back then. I’ve been waiting twenty-seven years for him to tell this story at a holiday dinner. He never would.”
“Why didn’t you ever look for us?” Jared asked. His voice had changed completely.
My uncle shrugged. “I knew you were okay. Your mom wrote it in the note. ‘His name is Jared. He’s perfect. Thank you.’ I kept that note in my visor for eleven years, until the cab got retired.”
I’d never seen Jared at a loss for words. He was now. He sat there looking at my uncle, and then he got up and walked into the hallway, and we heard him on the phone. “Mom? You need to come over. Right now. No, everything’s fine. I found him.”
His mother arrived forty minutes later, still in her coat, with snow in her hair. She walked straight into the dining room, took one look at my uncle and burst into tears. “You had a mustache,” she said.
“Shaved it in 2003,” Teo said. “Merry Christmas, Linda.”
She stayed for dessert. Jared sat next to my uncle for the rest of the night. At one point, I heard him ask, quietly, “What would you have done if it had gone wrong?”
“It didn’t,” Teo said. “You were stubborn. Still are.”
Jared and my cousin got engaged in the spring. He asked my uncle to drive them to the wedding. Not in an Uber. In an old yellow cab Teo borrowed from a friend, with a clean towel in the trunk, just in case.
