I went to Brainerd on a gray Saturday in October, two weeks after I opened the safe deposit box. I did not call ahead. I stood in the parking lot of the Lakeside Care Center with a paper bag on the seat beside me, and inside the bag were the small velvet pouch with the gold ring, the Polaroid, and the birth certificate. My legs would not move. I sat there for forty minutes watching the wind push gray waves across the lake, the way Walt must have sat every Wednesday for thirty years.
A kind aide named Mercy walked me down the hall. She said the old woman would be in the sunroom, as she always was on Saturdays, but that on Wednesdays she waited at the window from early afternoon. “She says her friend comes with the cribbage board,” Mercy told me. “He has not come in two months. She does not understand where he went.” I stopped walking. I could not breathe. Walt had been playing cribbage with my mother. For thirty years he had lost to her on purpose.
Marguerite Duval was a tiny woman in a lavender cardigan, white haired, with her hands folded in her lap and a cribbage board on the table in front of her. She looked up when I came in. She looked for a long time. Then she said, in a thin Minnesota voice that I recognized, because I speak with the same vowels, “You have his chin.” I did not know whether she meant Walt or the man I was about to hear about. I sat down across from her and put the paper bag on the table.
The truth sometimes arrives sixty eight years late, but a hand held out to it is never wasted.
“Walt told me you would come when he was gone,” she said. “He said he was the coward and I was the brave one, but that you deserved to hear the truth from both of us. I told him I was not brave. I have been afraid for sixty eight years.” She reached across the table and laid two fingers against the back of my hand, as light as a moth. “I was seventeen, Carol Ann. I worked in the kitchen of the Lindahl farm. Your father was Arne Lindahl, the oldest son. He was twenty six. He promised me everything, and he gave me this.”
She touched the velvet pouch. The ring. “His mother found out in February and sent me to the sisters in Brainerd to have the baby. His sister Helen could not have children, and the pastor arranged it between the families. They paid for the hospital and for my silence. I held you for two days. On the third they took you out of my arms. I never married. I never had another child. I never stopped listening for a piano.” I stared at her. “Why a piano?” She smiled. “Walt told me you played the organ. I wanted to know what my daughter sounded like.”
I thought of my wedding in 1981 at Trinity Lutheran. My father had died ten years before, and Uncle Arne, big and ruddy in a rented tuxedo, had walked me down the aisle with tears running down his face. I had thought the tears were for my father. Now I understood that the entire church had been looking at two people with the same chin, and only one of them had known. I asked if he was still alive. Marguerite shook her head. “He died in 2003. But he wrote you a letter. Walt kept it for me.”
She took a small envelope from the pocket of her cardigan, soft and gray with handling. I opened it with my thumbnail. It was one page, in a shaky hand. “Carol Ann, I am the man who gave you away twice, once in a church basement in 1958 and once at an altar in 1981. I was too weak to do it any other way. You were the best thing I ever did, and I never had the courage to say it. If you are reading this, you know the truth, and I hope you can forgive an old fool. Love, your father.”
I read it twice and handed it back to Marguerite. Then I stood up and walked to the old upright piano in the corner of the sunroom, the one nobody played. I lifted the lid and sat on the bench. I played Children of the Heavenly Father, slowly, the way I play it at funerals. Behind me I heard a thin voice begin to sing the second verse. Then another. By the end, a half dozen residents had gathered at the window, and the woman with the cribbage board was crying openly and holding the ring in her fist.
I told my children that same night, on the phone, one at a time. My daughter Linnea was quiet for a long minute, then said, “So that is where I got my hands.” My son laughed and said he had always wondered why we were so good at cards. Both of them wanted to come to Brainerd the following weekend. When they met Marguerite, she held each of their faces in her palms the way a person studies a painting, and she said, quietly, “I did not think I was allowed to have this.”
Now I drive to Brainerd every Wednesday afternoon. I bring the cribbage board of Walt in a canvas bag and a thermos of coffee, and I sit across from my mother at the table by the window. I lose a lot. She is sharp, and she counts fifteens faster than anyone I have ever played. Last week she pegged out and looked up at me with her pale blue eyes shining. “Lost again, Carol,” she said, in exactly the voice of Walt. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then we both started laughing.