I asked my daughter to give me the address again, and she said it belonged to a woman named Carol who had lived there for almost twenty years. I didn’t know any Carol. My daughter said she’d met her through someone at the hospital after my knee surgery, and that Carol had been struggling ever since her husband died. I asked why she had never told me she was sending groceries to a stranger. She said she knew I’d object, so she used my account because she thought I’d rather not know. Then I asked why Carol needed more than nine thousand dollars’ worth of groceries. My daughter started crying and said the groceries weren’t for Carol. They were for Carol’s daughter, who had been living in the house under another name.
I drove to Pendleton Avenue that afternoon. The woman who opened the door looked at me and immediately said, “You shouldn’t have come here alone.” I asked whether she was Carol. She said no, and then asked how I knew about the deliveries. I told her my daughter had been paying for them with my card. She looked frightened and said my daughter had promised nobody would ever connect the account to the house. Then she called someone from the kitchen. A teenage girl came into the hallway carrying one of the grocery bags, and I recognized her face immediately. I had seen that face once before, in a photograph my daughter kept tucked inside an old birthday card. I asked who she was. The woman said, “She’s the reason your daughter started sending everything here.”
I called my daughter from the driveway and asked her to tell me the truth before I came home. She finally admitted the girl was her daughter. I said that was impossible because my daughter had only ever told me about one child, the grandson I’d known since he was born. She said the girl had been born before she married, and she’d given her up because she was seventeen and terrified. I asked why the girl was living forty minutes away under a different surname. My daughter said the girl’s adoptive family had died two years ago, and she had been afraid to tell me because the girl had started asking questions about her birth. Then she said there was one thing she’d never told me. The adoption papers listed me as the emergency relative — because my daughter had put my name down before she gave birth, and the hospital had kept the record.
