“Yup. Not easy, but his parents are on top of it. I mean as much as one can be.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
“Don’t be sorry. He’s very dear. And then I have seven other grandchildren, and they’re all just great. Pretty great kids, they are.” She leaned and pointed to the photo of the young man graduating. “That’s the oldest one. Graduated from Orono a year ago.”
“Oh nice,” I said, and heard my phone ping again in my bag.
* * *
—
“Do you know,” Lois said, “there are very few regrets I have in my life. And I think that’s remarkable, because I look at the lives of the people around me and they are filled with regrets, or they ought to be, but I really feel that I have lived—as I told you—I have lived a very good life.” There was, I saw then, a stack of women’s magazines next to her chair, closer to the wall. The room, as I said, had a cluttered look, but it was not uncomfortable, and except for the water stain on the wallpaper behind her everything seemed clean.
Lois paused and stared off into the far corner of the room. “But one of my—maybe it’s even my biggest regret—” She looked back at me then. “—is that when that woman—Catherine—came to find me I just wasn’t as nice to her as I later thought I should have been.”
“Wait,” I said. “Hold on.” I leaned forward. “Did you say when she came to find you? She came to find you?”
Lois’s face showed surprise. “Yes. I thought you would have known that.”
“No.” And then I sat back and said, more quietly, “No, we had no idea that she came to find you.”
“Oh yes. It was the summer of—” And she named the year, and I recognized immediately that it had been the summer I was in the hospital for nine weeks and had not heard from Catherine almost at all.
“Well, what she did,” Lois said, and she crossed her ankles, settling herself into the chair, “what she did was she hired a private detective. Back then there was no internet, so she hired a private detective who found me—I was easy enough to find—and she knew this address, she came to this very house and sat exactly where you’re sitting right now.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t believe this.”
“Oh yes, and she did it on a weekday when she knew my husband would be at work, and the kids were all working at their uncle’s farm—that’s what the kids did back then, they all worked on the farm—and I had the summer off from teaching, and the doorbell rings—that doorbell never rings—” Lois pointed behind me to the front door, and I turned and looked at it. “And I went to that door, and she was standing there, and—”
“Did you know who she was?” I asked.
“You know…” Lois looked contemplatively at me. “I sort of did. Right away. But I also thought, No, it can’t be.” Lois shook her head slightly. “Anyway, she said to me, Do you know who I am? And I said, I have no idea who you are, and she said—she said this to me, that woman—she said, I am your mother, Catherine Cole.”
Lois put her hand up and drew it slightly back. “And I wanted to say, You are not my mother, but I didn’t. I just finally said, rather coldly, to her, Why don’t you come in, Catherine Cole.” Lois looked at me and nodded. “I was cold to her, I was really quite cold to her. My parents were both dead by then, they had died recently, six months apart—which she knew, of course, through the private detective—and I thought it was wrong of her to have found me after so many years, and also the way she just waltzed in and sat down as though she and I knew each other, and then she wept a little—”
“She wept?” I said, and Lois nodded and sighed with her cheeks slightly billowing out.
“But mostly she talked. And you know what else? She was very citified. I mean the dress she showed up in—well, I figured this out later, that she was sixty-two years old, because I was forty-one—and she showed up, in the summertime, in an almost sleeveless dress. Just little caps over the shoulders.” Lois touched her shoulder with her hand. “It was navy blue with white—oh, what is it called, you know the word, what’s the word, that stuff that goes around—”
“Piping,” I said. I knew the dress that Lois spoke of. It was Catherine’s favorite everyday dress. It had white piping around the sleeves and on the seams down the sides.