Besides, by now, hadn’t some statute of limitations passed? Part of me, of course, still hoped Grace would turn up for our Florida meeting very drunk, half dressed, decidedly blowsy. My worst fear was—she wouldn’t! I longed to turn, at last, toward my real family, my smart wife and our bright, versatile girls, to say at last, “You see? What kind of person could’ve done such things, and to her only child?”

…

I understood how my lunging in on Grace, mid-act, April 15th, 1956, spread-eagle on that rose-patterned couch, an entrance singularly unexpected even after my breaking open the screen door—I knew how that at once reversed her own young life along with mine, and his. I knew I’d razed at least one vestibule of her long lifespan. Still, I could never quite forgive Grace’s “dropping me.” And at the ripe old age of eight. As an adult, as a teacher, as a parent myself, I still (monthly if not weekly, daily) find her behavior toward me perplexing and quietly, steadily damaging. It’s easy to say one should throw all such toxic cargo overboard. But actually doing that is something of a bitch.

Sure, I knew that being sent away to school had probably “been the making of me.” Would I otherwise have given myself so wholly to my kids, my serious teaching, my passionate if obscure scholarly pursuits? All this sprang from just such early abandonment. Even my undying tie with Clyde developed during our Sunday banishments, exits that her public love affair forced upon us. I’d been lucky, if not in my biology, then in at least my mentors…. So—shouldn’t I just go ahead at last and thank Grace Delman for whatever I had—even accidentally—achieved?

My wife forever urged me to phone “poor Grace.” At least to reciprocate Mom’s most recent birthday gift and Christmas card. “Meadows, she can’t be that bad.” I gave my cool thin history-major Bethany such a silent tantrum of a look. “I mean,” she tried to justify her goading, “she is your mother. No matter who your literal father was. If you ever bothered to carry anybody around for nine months slung directly over your bladder, you’d see how said carrier might expect that parcel to bother phoning her every three to four decades. You’re always telling your students how short human history really is. Well, the old crow won’t be alive forever. She was probably just a kid then. You lug it all around, Meadows. She didn’t directly kill your dad. You’re maybe afraid you did. But you’d probably prefer to blame her for another forty years. Here Endeth the Bethany Lesson. But, then, how many times before have you ignored my saying this?”

I gave my wife a single paint-blistering stare. Sullen, it said, “You, the by-product of orthodontia and dressage, you, grown up in total love, cannot know all I lost at eight.” I then walked direct into my study. I yanked out the envelope from Grace’s last, costly, gilded, tasteless Christmas card. I’d saved it, just in case.