Chapter 23 (My Story)

I RESOLVED not to write the story Tuesday night because I had serious work to catch up on Wednesday. I got started on Wednesday night and then finished it Thursday night.

According to Mary Sinclair, Dad had continued the affair into the fall and winter, but then this Gloria went to the church and publicly accused him of getting her pregnant. The Board of Trustees met with Dad soon thereafter and expelled him from the church. He went home, packed what he could in the Corvair and left town. I was sure he’d scraped the clergy sticker off his car, too. Mary thought he was also sick, and from what Dad had said in one of his stories, it must have been a couple of months later that he got the confirmed diagnosis that his cancer was terminal.

I can’t and won’t try to justify Dad’s actions. There must have been a hundred ways to handle the situation, including talking things out with his wife and confirming the girl’s story. It was only a week later that she’d confessed that she wasn’t really pregnant but was tired of waiting for Dad to divorce and marry her. Dad was already waiting for his doctor to tell him what was wrong with him, had left Mary, and was living in his car. It was all terrible.

But I can’t let any of that color my image of the kind and devoted husband and father I knew him to be in my life. I suppose, somehow, that past history and the miraculous cure of his cancer when he was counting his days on earth, are what shaped his relationship with Mom and his utter devotion to his family from that day forward.

It’s probably also why he had so many fantasies of time travel in which he could express his wanton behavior, kill enemies, raise or at least give birth to families that he never got to grow old with. It all made a peculiar kind of sense. I called Megan early Friday morning the Fourth of July after I’d emailed her a transcript of what I’d written.

“God! I want to sympathize with that woman, but I’m equally glad her life turned out well with her second husband and children. And she gave you this box of all his things? I want you to scan the letters and send them to me,” she said.

“I haven’t read them all. The early ones I read were kind of typical teenage love letters. The last couple were filled with sadness. I’d guess she knew she was dying,” I said.

“Have you started hunting down her relatives?” Megan asked. “You have to admit the most likely candidate for your wife’s grandmother is Rachel Erickson.”

“Wouldn’t she have told Dad if she was pregnant?”

“It sounds like it’s just the opposite of what his lover, Gloria, did. Gloria made the whole thing public, lied about being pregnant, and destroyed his marriage and ministry. Rachel was committed to not damaging his ministry. I suppose in a way, they both did harm, but I consider Rachel to be the one acting out of love.”

“Well, I’ll start searching for traces of the family on Monday. We have pictures of the younger siblings in the yearbook that was in the box. The school used the high school yearbook to record all the elementary schools’ info and class photos, too. I suppose I should cross-check to see if any ended up back in Battle Creek, but I’d guess the better lead will be in St. Louis.”

“Now, I’ve got some news,” Megan said.

“Yeah?”

“Val’s family has the same genome markers we do. We’re distantly related,” she said.

“How distantly? This isn’t pointing to Dad as Val’s grandfather, is it?” I demanded.

“No, not that near. But the genetic marker is strong enough to point to a common branch as little as a hundred or a hundred-fifty years ago.”

“Well, that’s not so bad.”

“For that relationship, it’s not bad at all. But we noted that Val and Zach both had perfect attendance in school. Well, I talked to Val’s mother, Ruby, and got the other kids’ health records. She was really helpful and interested in the results of the study. I haven’t mentioned the relationship yet. But she and all four kids have always had stellar health. Don, on the other hand, had cancer, but is in remission. We can still see at least one of the known genes that is a marker toward hereditary cancer vulnerability. That’s not to say it causes cancer, but that people with that marker often get cancer.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, not knowing where Megan was going with this information.