Ten-Finger Exercises

...continued

Sorry. I'd left my car to have new brakes and shocks put on it, and I had to pick it up before they closed. It still goes 'clunk' on bumpy roads, but maybe it's a clunk I'll have to live with.

To continue my story: when Bill and I had been dating just a few months, and his daughter Elizabeth was still angry with him and spiteful, she demanded that he find these twins. Her mother had turned her very much against Bill, and I wonder if maybe embarrassing him in front of me didn't play a part in the story. She had made it clear that I didn't know "the real Bill," who she considered abusive. She testified at the divorce hearing that he had shot her with a squirt gun. Thankfully, she and her brother both began to see how well he and I got along, how there was no yelling or other dramatics, etc.

Elizabeth said it was her right to know these half siblings, and she would initiate the search as long as he paid for it. To humor her, more than anything else I think, he went along with it.

He had actually put these twins out of his mind, filed away under "guilt" most likely, so much that he didn't even remember they weren't both boys. When he confessed to his parents, he wasn't even sure he was the one responsible for this pregnancy, and his dad had taken over the situation, ordering Bill out of it. Bill went to the hospital to sign the papers and that was that.

When we found Kevin and Joan (not their real names,) they agreed to meet us. We went first to Seattle to Kevin's house, where he lived with three girls who were members of his band. He was a grad student, studying oceanography, played gigs on weekends. Later we caught a ferry and went to an island in the San Juans to meet Joan. She was a teacher, also in grad school.

There was not a single doubt that these kids (28 yr olds by then) were his children. They had his coloring, his body shape, his musical ability, his brains, and the same gap between their front two teeth. They were friendly, outgoing people like he is, and they were interested in their new roots.

By the end of the day they reassured Bill that he had made the right choice, that they had had a rich childhood that would not have happened if he and their mom had married without love. At nineteen Bill had certainly not been ready to be a parent. The couple who adopted them had four older children and lived in a wonderful house on one of the islands. They had a boat, a beach, a family, and each other. They took fabulous vacations, and had a good start on life.

Kevin, and Joan to some extent, kept in touch with Bill by email. They called him "bio-dad" to distinguish him from the dad they'd known all their lives. When he was in the area on business, he took them out to dinner. Several times they planned to stop here on their way to somewhere, at least Joan, who married soon after we met her, and her husband did; but it never worked out somehow.

More tomorrow, or later, as the case may be.