“Sit down, Albert. We’re going to talk.”
I hesitate, and then take my seat again, hands clenched.
“If it’s okay, I’d like to ask you some questions.” Dr. Statler flips to a clean page and clicks his pen. “When and how did you learn Agatha Lawrence was your biological mother?”
I hesitate, count to ten. Do it: tell him. “Last year,” I say. “When I received a letter from an attorney in New York.” I’m sitting at my kitchen table, eating sparerib tips and white rice from a Styrofoam container. I’m sorting the mail and waiting for Jeopardy! to begin when I come across the silky linen stationery with the attorney’s logo at the top. “‘Dear Mr. Bitterman,’” I say out loud to Sam, reciting the letter. “‘Our firm has been retained to locate you, regarding a critical family matter.’ They invited me to their office in Manhattan to discuss it in person. Offered to pay my way.” He’s watching me, intent. “First class on Amtrak.”
“What did you think when you read this letter?”
“I thought it was a scam,” I say. “One of those Nigerian princes out to get my last thousand dollars. The only family I had left was my father, assuming he’s still alive, and if he wanted to contact me, all he had to do was respond to the Christmas card I send him every year.” The phone is heavy in my hands, the TV on mute, the faint scent of fried food from Happy Chinese downstairs as I dial the phone number printed on the letterhead. “A woman lawyer answered the phone when I called,” I tell Dr. Statler. “I asked her if this was some sort of joke, and she said she’d prefer we speak in person. She sounded serious.”
“Did anyone accompany you to New York?”
I laugh. “Yeah, right. Like who? The only friend I had was Linda, and even if her son hadn’t applied for that restraining order, the agency would never have given me permission to take her to New York.” In Penn Station I made my way through a throng of grouchy people to the top floor, where a man in a wrinkled suit who smelled like cigarettes was holding a sign with my name on it. He led me to a black car, two warm bottles of Poland Spring water stuck into the seat pocket in front of me.
“Their offices were on Park Avenue, and a pretty young woman led me to a conference room.” There was a tray of bagels and raw fish, strawberries with their stems already removed. Someone knocked, and then four people in suits marched in, sat in a U shape around me, and showed me photographs of a woman with wild red curls and eyeglasses with bright blue frames. “They told me she had given birth to me fifty-one years ago at a hospital outside Chicago, Illinois.”
“I read her account of the pregnancy and birth,” Dr. Statler says. “Quite traumatic.” My father was some boy she met on a family vacation to the Dominican Republic, whose last name she never asked for. She was seventeen and the top of her class, and her father would not allow it. Arrangements and announcements were made. “Boarding school,” they called it. There were five other girls when she arrived. The oldest girl was twenty-two, the youngest fourteen, all equally well connected. She labored alone for nearly ten hours and was allowed to see me a few times a day for the next six days, before the nice couple from Indiana could make preparations to come for me.
“It devastated her,” Dr. Statler says. “Having to give you away. But she had no say in the matter.” He places the notebook on his lap and folds his hands. “What was it like for you, learning all of this?”
“It finally made sense,” I say. “When my father said I wasn’t his. I wasn’t either of theirs. But I was mostly excited to meet her. Fifty-one years old and a chance to be part of a family.”
“And?”
“They told me she’d died.” I remember the shock when the woman said this, the way I pinched my palm to stop the tears. “She’d been looking for me her whole life, but she had to die to find me. That’s how the attorney explained it to me, at least. It was only after she died that the court would agree to unseal the adoption papers. They had to, in order to let me know that she’d named me the sole heir of the Lawrence family estate.”
“Ninety-two million dollars, it says here.”
“And the family home in Chestnut Hill, New York,” I say. “I’d been out of work for a few months. I didn’t know what else to do, and so I moved here, into her house.” I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering opening the front door and walking into the house for the first time, everything as she had left it, dust on the furniture and accumulating in the corners.