…your husband’s son.”
I remembered him. Tall, dark-haired, forties, standing at the back of the church at my husband Frank’s funeral. He’d come up to me afterward, held my hand and said, very gently, “I’m so sorry. I’m Frank’s son. From before. He never told you about me. I just wanted to pay my respects.”
Then he’d left. I never saw him again. I’d spent a year wondering about him. Wondering if Frank had kept a child secret from me for forty-two years.
“His name is Mark,” my daughter, Lisa, said, crying. “He came to me a month after the funeral. He said he was Dad’s son from an affair in the seventies. He said he was going to contest the will and drag the family through court. He said he’d tell everyone Dad cheated on you. Unless I paid him to go away quietly.”
“And you paid him?” I asked.
“I didn’t want you to find out,” she said. “I didn’t want you to lose Dad twice. So I paid him. From your account. A little at a time. I was going to pay it all back. I swear.”
Seventy-five thousand dollars.
I made her a cup of tea. I sat down next to her. And then I asked the question that had been bothering me since the funeral. “Did you ever see any proof that he was really your father’s son?”
She stared at me. “He knew things. About Dad. Where he grew up. His Army unit.”
“Lisa,” I said, “all of that was in your father’s obituary.”
We went to the police together the next morning. A detective listened to everything. Then he pulled up a file on his computer and turned the screen toward us. A photo. The same tall, dark-haired man.
“His name isn’t Mark,” the detective said. “It’s Robert Keane. He reads obituaries. He goes to funerals. He finds the most emotional family member and tells them he’s a secret child. Usually it’s a son or a daughter. You’re the fourth family in this county.”
Lisa put her hands over her face.
He was arrested six weeks later. The police recovered about forty thousand dollars of what he’d taken from us. The rest was gone.
Lisa cried at my kitchen table and said she’d never forgive herself. I held her hands and said, “You were trying to protect me. You were trying to protect your father’s memory. He’d have done the same thing.”
“I should have told you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “You should have. Next time, we carry it together.”
I asked a lawyer to set up my accounts so that any transfer over five hundred dollars needs two signatures. Mine, and my son’s. Lisa suggested it herself.
My grandson still asks me about “the bank picture thing.” I told him the truth. That his mom made a mistake because she loves me, and that he helped fix it by telling me.
“So I’m a detective?” he asked.
“The best one in the family,” I said.
He told everyone at school.
