Diane took my hand in the driveway, in front of the movers, and I let her, because I was too stunned to pull away. I am Gloria Teague, seventy three years old, a cafeteria lady for twenty six years, and the woman before me wore the Hamilton watch of my husband on a wrist as thin as a bird. “Gloria, please sit with me,” she said, “and I will tell you everything. Brian was going to tell you himself. He wanted to do it gently. He just did not know how.” Across the street, my son turned the corner in his Buick, going far too fast.
We sat on the tailgate of the U Haul, the two of us, in the October sun, while the movers carried the recliner of my husband up the steps. Diane told me a story that I had never heard in fifty years of marriage. In 1972, she had married Carl Teague in Branson, a boy of twenty with a Coca Cola route. She had a baby in 1975, and then a long illness that took her to a hospital for nearly three years. During that time, Carl brought the baby to his own mother. He met me at a church supper in 1985. He told me the baby was his nephew.
My hands were icy. I looked at the front door of the Patterson house, where Brian was now standing on the porch with his hands hanging at his sides, fifty years old and as ashamed as a boy. I had raised that child from the age of nine, because Carl said his sister had passed and left him an orphan. I had braided his shoelaces. I had held his head the night his first girlfriend left. And he was not the nephew of Carl at all. He was the son of Carl, by a wife who had never been divorced.
A moving truck unloading the furniture of her late husband gave one cafeteria lady the length of a Saturday morning to bring her son and a stranger back to the truth in Springfield.
I gave my terms standing in the driveway, in my bathrobe and my slippers, with my cracked coffee cup still in my hand, to my son and to the woman beside me. “Brian, you will come down off that porch. Diane, you are welcome in my house. I have wanted a sister my whole life. But I want the truth first. Why were the things of Carl moved here without telling me? What did you do with the coins? And what exactly did my husband leave in his will, because I think I deserve to hear it with both of you.”
Brian came slowly down the steps and stopped with his head hanging. “Mom, I sold the coin collection in July,” he said. “Forty one thousand dollars. I owed it to a man in Branson for a bad truck loan, and I could not tell you. Diane found me crying in a parking lot, and she asked what was wrong, and I told her. She said we should move the things of Dad to her new house so you would not see the empty cabinet. I thought I could buy the coins back before you noticed.” He bent his head. “I have been lying to you for three months, Mom. I am so sorry.”
But Brian could not stand another second. He suddenly turned, ran up the porch steps, snatched a small wooden coin case from the hands of the nearest mover, the one he had hidden for himself, and ran for the side of the house, meaning to cut across the backyards to his car. He leaped over a flower bed. Diane cried his name. The two young movers, big fellows in T shirts, stepped out from the garage. And my neighbor Mr. Haley, who had come out to watch, pulled his truck across the alley.
Brian stopped between the garage and the fence, with the coin case against his chest and two large men in front of him, the truck of my neighbor behind, and his mother and the woman he had called mother both coming around the corner of the house, holding hands. The morning light slanted gold across the wet grass. I walked up to him and laid my palm on his cheek, as I had when he was nine and had stolen a pack of gum. He crumpled against my shoulder and wept. The case slid to the grass.
The consequences were warm, if a little sore. The coin collection was traced to a dealer in Joplin, and with the help of a lawyer and some of my own savings, the collection was bought back, piece by piece, over a year. The furniture stayed at the Patterson house, where Diane lived, and I visited on Tuesdays. The will of Carl, when we read it together, left his personal things to both of us, with a letter that said only, I am sorry. I should have told you both. Brian worked weekends to repay the dealer.
In the name of my husband Carl, who passed in June, I started the Carl Teague Fund. It pays for family reunification help and transportation for relatives separated by long illness or distance and for lunch accounts and winter coats for school children, in Greene, Christian and Webster counties. In the first year we reunited sixty two families and clothed four hundred children. One was a forty eight year old woman from Ozark who stepped off a bus and was met on the platform by a daughter she had not seen in eleven years.
On a gray, cold Thanksgiving, my kitchen in Springfield was crowded and warm. Diane stood beside me at the stove, in my second best apron, stirring the gravy, and Brian carved the turkey at the counter, grinning. On the mantel stood the Hamilton watch, ticking, polished by two women who had never expected to share a holiday. When we sat down at the long table, Diane took one of my hands and Brian took the other. “Gloria,” she said, “thank you for raising my boy.” I could not answer, and I did not need to.