Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

The morning after Silas stood on her front porch, Lydia walked to the library and sat down at a computer to see what she could find. She typed into the Google search box the letters that spelled George King, the name on the business card she kept for years and eventually threw away. She kept it through the pregnancy, which she did not expect, but when she found out she was three months along, she knew who the father was. Earl was in a nightly blackout so he had no idea they hadn’t had sex in more than six months. No man ever crowed louder when he found out he was going to be a father. She let him carry on, but she held on to that business card, tucked it deep in her wallet, and waited for the storm that was coming. She knew it was going to be rough, that most likely it would be clear to everyone right away that Earl was not the father, but she knew on the other side there was a strong chance she’d be free and she’d have a child. She held on to that card through the expected divorce and the first lonely years after, with no alimony or support of any kind from Earl, no support from anyone but her mother, and even that was at arm’s length, with conditions, and scornful. Many times she almost called that number. But she didn’t want to complicate a life she knew was already complicated. Not until Luke started swimming was it clear her baby could do something better than anyone else, was going to be all right on his own someday without his mother, and without the help of a father he never knew. This is when she ripped up the card; the only-in-an-extreme-emergency button she never pushed.

George King. After a few pecked letters on the computer keyboard, she had an address, an obituary for his wife — cancer, eleven years after he’d been in Wells — a business address, and a number, which she later called. After three rings the line clicked to an automated outgoing message, and she listened for an option that would confirm he still worked there. For George King, press one, the generic voice spoke. For Rick King, press two . Over thirty years later and George King was right where he was then. Working with his brother in Atlanta, Georgia. It seemed too easy to find him. She played the message again and pressed one. She had no intention of speaking to him but wanted to see what would happen. A young Southern woman answered brightly, George King’s office. Hello? Heart thumping, Lydia immediately hung up. After a few more keystrokes at the library, pictures appeared on the screen. Here was the man she knew for less than three weeks, who asked her questions, listened to the answers, and who was, then, as lost and fearful as she was. He looked much the same, but thicker and balding, gray now dominating what remained of his coarse and closely cut hair and beard. In one of the photos he had won a golf championship at a country club, and another was a group shot of a high school reunion. Both were photos taken in the last three years. It surprised her to see him handsome, tall, and distinguished. He had been, then, in his midthirties, a young father, panicked about the future — money, his wife, his troubled son, his pushy brother — but here he was a successful man nearing retirement. He wore the sort of clothes worn by the men from New York Lydia worked for, and in his eyes was none of the startled and still-clinging youth she remembered. Yet the kindness she found there when she needed it, this she could see. Looking at these few photos, the first glimpses she’d had of George King since that last morning at the Betsy, she could see the same high forehead, wide smile, and thin, almost feminine, eyebrows. Here was Luke if he had grown to late middle age, the man who would have grown old with June and who would someday, maybe, she thinks for the first time now, have met his father. Lydia’s deal with Luke was that she’d tell him when he was twenty-one, and as a kid and in high school it became an every-so-often, light running joke between them . Denzel’s going to want me to change my name to Washington after we meet, right? he’d joke. Because that may cost him a few dollars. He’s got some years to make up for, don’t you think?

At twenty-one, Luke wasn’t interested in anything she had to say, and later, in that first year after June brought them back into each other’s lives, they tiptoed around it, were moving cautiously toward the heavy subjects. They were being careful with each other, taking their time. We’ll get there, Lydia told June once when she’d pressed about it, but there’s no rush now, we have the rest of our lives.

The day after she called George’s office, she called a 1-800 number for American Airlines that she found in the back of a travel magazine at the library and asked for a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Atlanta, Georgia. This was the first plane ticket she’d ever purchased, the first time she would travel in anything but a car.

Three days later an envelope with a Washington State postmark arrived in her mailbox. After she opened it and read Mimi Landis’s short note on motel stationery to let her know where June was living and the contact details there, she called the airline again. She read her confirmation number over the phone and when she finished asked if she could change the ticket to fly somewhere else first. The impatient woman on the other end asked where, and Lydia answered, Seattle, Washington .

Outside, the ocean crashes. She is dressed, her linen jacket is still on, and the bed she lies on is made. Something wakes her, and as her body tenses, she opens her eyes long enough to recognize the room, see the faintest light coming from behind the blinds. I’m here, she thinks, and relaxes again into the mattress. She pulls the pillow closer and tucks her legs toward her chest as she falls back to sleep.

The screen door slams. It is morning. The wooden folding chair she has fallen asleep on is now covered in dew. She is damp and her bones ache and he has come back. She stands and stretches and steps out of the tent onto the lawn where she met Luke four years ago when he came to clear fallen limbs after a tropical storm had blown them everywhere. It’s a disaster, she said that day, and he stopped and said, amused but with a gentle authority, as if he were speaking to a child, Oh, it’s not so bad. Not really . She remembers seeing his face for the first time and how thrown she was. How she reacted as she had before with a sculpture or installation or painting so exquisite and so stirring that she could not take it all in at once. It was the same with Luke. Eyebrow, forearm, cheekbone, neck, lower lip, eyes, bicep, mole. And the most beautiful brown skin. She had never been so struck by the physical appearance of a man before. Women, on rare occasion. Some collision of hair and skin and angle of light amid an origami of fabric and jewelry. But in faded green T-shirt and worn Levi’s, this man who had come to clear branches away presented a riddle of bone and skin and eyes that left June speechless. Oh, no, it’s a disaster all right, she remembers saying again, and how before he spoke, he smiled.

Crossing the lawn, she can see them both as they were, standing in a mess of fallen branches, the moment before meeting. Only now, damp with dew and stiff from strange sleep, does she recognize how unlikely and lucky that moment was, how she has until now taken it for granted, remembered Luke’s arrival with a kind of regret, experienced his staying as a disruption, a complication, as if love were an inconvenience thrust on her, uninvited. She had welcomed him as a disaster and she was wrong. She has wasted this time and she has held him away.

When she has crossed half the distance between the tent and the house, she wants to call out to him and nearly does, but it is early and everyone is still asleep. She will be there soon, she tells herself. Through the porch door and into the house — the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, wherever he is. Soon, she will find him, and for once she will not worry or be annoyed or impatient or afraid.