“They’re my children, Mama.”
“They are someone else’s children!”
“No,” I said gently. “They are mine.”
Eventually, I stopped answering.
And somehow, life kept going.
My parents stayed angry.
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***
Amanda became a pediatric nurse. Derrick opened a small auto shop. Sue became a third-grade teacher. Jacob and David became engineers and still argued over everything. Sophie became a social worker and once told me she chose that profession because she wanted to be for other children what I had been for her.
I cried in the kitchen for an hour after she left that day.
Thirty years passed, and I don’t regret a single thing.
I cried in the kitchen for an hour.
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***
Every Saturday, my children returned to the house I’d somehow managed to keep. Grandchildren ran through the yard. The kitchen smelled of roast chicken, tea, and Amanda’s lemon cake.
This past Saturday was no different at first.
Sophie was setting the table. Jacob and David were arguing about football. Derrick was fixing a cabinet door I hadn’t asked him to fix. Amanda was telling me to sit down because I looked tired.
Then someone knocked.
My children returned to the house.
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I opened the door and found a man in a gray suit holding a leather folder.
“Margaret?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“My name is Mr. Johnson. I was Robert’s attorney.”
The room behind me seemed to fall silent.
“Robert?” I whispered.
He held out a thick envelope. My name was written across the front in handwriting I recognized immediately, even after three decades.
“I was Robert’s attorney.”
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“Ma’am, I was instructed to deliver this to you on this exact day,” the lawyer said. “Those were his explicit instructions before he passed on.”
Before I could gather enough breath to ask anything, Mr. Johnson gave a respectful nod, turned, and walked back to his car.
I stood in the doorway with the envelope shaking in my hand.
“Mama?” Amanda said behind me. “Who was that?”
I couldn’t answer.
“I was instructed to deliver this.”
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I walked back to the table where all 10 of my grown children sat waiting, and I broke the seal with trembling hands.
The room went quiet as a church.
“Read it, Mama,” Amanda whispered.
So I did.
Robert wrote that he’d been ill for months before the wedding. The tiredness, headaches, weight loss, and strange aches he kept blaming on work.
“Read it, Mama.”
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One week before we were supposed to marry, doctors gave him the news. They believed he had months, perhaps a year. There was an experimental treatment, but no promise that it would help.
“I couldn’t bear to marry you, then make you a widow, leave you with 10 grieving children, and bury you all under medical bills. So, I left. The note I left was cruel because I thought cruelty would free me faster than pity.”
I had to stop reading. I felt sick.
Sophie reached for my hand.
They believed he had months.
