I read the last page aloud, slowly, in the voice I used for thirty years at closing tables. It was a sealed adoption decree from the district court in Twin Falls, dated the ninth of June, 1980, and stapled behind it was a statement from the Magic Valley Care Center. The decree named a newborn girl, Stacy Lynn, and her birth mother, Marlene Ann Hobbs, age nineteen. It named the adoptive parents. Douglas and Joanne Mercer. The statement showed a resident named Marlene Hobbs, in room fourteen, and an account that had been paid every month for six years. The payer was me.
Stacy sat across the table with her hands wrapped around her water glass, so thin that her wedding ring turned loose on her finger. “Mom, you knew,” she whispered. “You knew all this time.” I nodded. “Stacy, I have known for twenty years,” I said. “Your father told me in the car on the way home from your wedding. He said a girl in Twin Falls had your eyes. I drove there the next week.” Doug, at the end of the table, dropped his head into his hands. Pat, my office manager of twenty two years, who had slipped in with the cake, closed her eyes and did not move.
Marlene had not been a stranger to me for a long time. I had sat with her on the porch of that small care center more Sundays than I could count. She had been a waitress, then a cleaner, and a hard life had left her with bad lungs and a good heart. I had paid her bills quietly, and I had told no one, not even Doug. Now the whole story was out on the table, between the roast and the cake. “She asked me every time whether you were happy,” I said to Stacy. “I never knew what to tell her.”
A graduation cake left uncut at a Sunday supper gave one wife the weekend to bring her daughter back to the table in Boise.
I gave my terms at the head of the table, with the graduation cake between us. The agency had sold for eight point nine million, and I would not give up my daughter or my husband without a fight. Doug would sit down with a lawyer and make a full statement to the pharmacy board. Stacy would enter a treatment program in Salt Lake City by the end of the week, and I would drive her there myself. We would visit Marlene together on Sunday. And no one at this table would keep another secret, large or small, for as long as I lived.
Doug raised a gray, wet face. “Joanne, it was me,” he said. “The pills. Stacy had the back injury after the car accident, and the doctor stopped writing the prescription. So I went to a clinic in Twin Falls and filled new ones in the name of Marlene. Her insurance, her signature. I told myself I was helping.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was killing our daughter.” The room was so quiet that I could hear the clock in the hall. Stacy stared at her father as if she had never seen him. “Dad, you gave me the bottles in the garage,” she said. “I thought they were mine.”
Stacy stood up, and the chair scraped. For a moment I thought she would run. Instead, she walked around the table, past the cake, and stopped in front of her father. She did not hit him, and she did not shout. She laid both hands on his shoulders and looked down at the top of his head, thinning and gray. “Dad, I am not going to forgive you tonight,” she said. “But I am going to get well. And you are going to tell the board everything.” Doug nodded, again and again, like a child. Then she turned to me, and her face broke. “Mom, how did you stay?”
“Stacy, I stayed for you,” I told her. “And a little for him.” I took her cold hands in mine. “I was angry for a long time. I was angry at your father and at myself and even at Marlene, who had done nothing but give me a daughter.” I smiled, because I could not help it. “That is a gift, and I chose to keep it.” She put her arms around my neck the way she had at six, and the cake candles, which no one had thought to blow out, guttered one by one. Pat stood and quietly took the cake to the kitchen.
The money consequences followed in order. Doug surrendered his license to the state board, pleaded to a reduced charge, and agreed to repay the cost of the prescriptions and the investigation. He moved into the guest room and attended counseling twice a week. Stacy completed ninety days in treatment and came home to a small apartment near the agency, where Pat gave her a desk and a part time job. The care center bills were put on a long term plan, and the judge sealed the records. The trust from the sale of the agency stayed whole, and every dollar of it is still mine to give.
In the name of my mother, Edith, who passed in 2005 and who sewed graduation gowns for the girls of our church for forty years, I started the Edith Thimble Fund. It pays for treatment, family counseling and legal help for older families in Ada and Twin Falls counties who are dealing with addiction and with secrets that have grown too heavy to carry. In the first year, we helped seventeen families. A woman of sixty nine, in a blue cardigan, sat in the office and said, “I thought I was the only one holding a secret like this.”
On a Sunday in September, I drove to Twin Falls with Stacy in the passenger seat and a box in her lap. She had been clean for six months. At the care center, a nurse wheeled Marlene into the sun room, small and gray, with an oxygen line at her nose. Stacy knelt in front of the chair and opened the box. Inside was a small cake, frosted in white, with a gold paper cap on top. “Marlene, I finished my certificate last week,” Stacy said. “I wanted you to be the first to see it.” Marlene touched her cheek with a trembling hand. “My girl,” she said.
