I worked it free, saw what it was, and had to catch myself against the closet door, because it was a photograph, and the woman in it was holding a baby on the steps of a house I have never seen in my life, and on the back, in Dot’s handwriting, it said: Verna Lee Prewitt, 1957, holding you. She was nineteen. Her sister Carol Ann is still living and she has been waiting on your phone call for two years, honey, and I am sorry it took me this long to be brave about it.
I was adopted at three years old by the Loomises out of Wheeling and I never knew one thing about where I came from. My mother told me my birth mother was a girl who couldn’t keep me and that was the whole of it, and she said it kindly and she said it once, and in that family you did not ask a question twice.
I have wondered every day of my life. I have never said so out loud to another human being, including Dot, except one time in 1998 in a motel in Roanoke after a funeral, when I’d had three drinks and told my wife that I’d like to know if I had my daddy’s hands.
She remembered. Twenty-seven years and she remembered.
Under the photograph was the rest of it. A DNA test result printed out from one of those websites, with a woman named Carol Ann Bosley listed as a close relative. Two letters from her, addressed to Dot, in a shaky old hand. A copy of a birth record from Ohio County. And a phone number written on the back of a church bulletin and circled twice.
Dot spit in a tube and mailed off my family, is what she did. She started in 2023. She wrote letters to a stranger in Tennessee and did not tell me because — and Carol Ann told me this on the phone, because Dot had written it to her plain — she was afraid that if it went bad, I’d have gotten my hopes up and then had to lose the same thing twice.
Verna Lee died in 1981. That is the part I have to carry and there’s no fixing it.
But Carol Ann is eighty-four and she has a photograph album, and she says my birth mother talked about me every year on my birthday until the day she passed, and she says I have Verna Lee’s hands and not a thing about me looks like anybody else in that family.
I drove down to Kingsport in April. She met me on the porch and she stood there a long minute and then she said, well. Well. There you are.
The buttons. I have looked at them since. There are buttons in that tin off my daddy Loomis’s work coat and off my boy’s letter jacket and off a dress of Dot’s I’d know anywhere, and a card in the bottom that says a woman ought to keep the buttons because you never know what’s coming apart next.
I said well, that’s a first, in a way that wasn’t kind, and set it up on the closet shelf. A month later she was gone in the night beside me, and my whole family sat up on that shelf under a pile of buttons for eleven months.
I’ve got two of Carol Ann’s albums copied at the drugstore. And a watch would have been on my wrist a few years and then in a drawer.