The albums were in plastic bins under the folding tables in the church basement. My father’s widow kept trying to steer people toward the food line every time somebody walked near them. After she grabbed my arm, I waited until she got pulled into the kitchen by one of the church ladies, then I opened the nearest bin myself.
There were barely any photos of me after about age twelve.
Not missing completely. Just weirdly reduced. School pictures gone. Birthday photos missing. Vacations where everybody else was there except me. In one album there was a photo from my high school graduation, but I’d literally been cut out of the frame with scissors. You could still see part of my blue sleeve beside my father’s shoulder.
One of the men from the auto shop walked over while I was flipping through them. He looked embarrassed the second he realized I’d found the albums already.
He finally said, “Your dad told people your mother took you away after the divorce.”
I told him that never happened. I lived with my father until college. Same house. Same school district. Same everything.
That’s when things started making sense in the worst possible way. My father had apparently built two completely separate versions of his life. Around town, especially after he remarried, he slowly stopped mentioning me altogether. His friends thought I lived in Columbus with my mother and only visited occasionally. Some honestly believed I was a niece he helped financially after my mom “had problems.”
I confronted his widow in the parking lot before I left. She got quiet for a long time then finally admitted he started doing it after I kept refusing to call her “Mom.”
She said he thought it would be “less stressful” if people stopped asking about me.
Then she handed me a cardboard box from the trunk of her Buick. My actual baby photos were inside it beside a hospital bracelet labeled “Denise Marie Carter — Akron General — March 1981.”