The red haired woman at the dinner table in the window of the little brick house in Jenks looked up as I walked across the lawn, and she did not seem the least bit surprised. I am Patricia Owens, sixty eight years old, of Broken Arrow, and I stood on the dewy grass in my gardening shoes with the family tree of my granddaughter folded in my fist. Next to the woman sat my husband Jerry, with a napkin in his collar. Next to him was a young woman with his chin. And in the driveway stood the truck of my own son Mike.
I knocked on the front door, and Mike opened it. He is forty three years old, a quiet, kind, bearded man, and he did not say a word. He only stepped aside to let me in, and I saw on his face that he had been waiting for this day for a very long time. Down the hall, a baby was fussing in a high chair, and a clock ticked, and the smell of pot roast hung in the air, the same pot roast that Jerry had told me for years he was too busy to eat at my table on Wednesday nights.
The woman at the table was Lynn Dillard, sixty three, with red hair and a gentle, tired face. The young woman was her daughter Sara, thirty eight. The baby in the high chair was her grandson. And my husband of forty four years, the man who had sold insurance in Tulsa and driven to Jenks three nights a week for supposed visits to his sick cousin, laid down his fork. He stood. He opened his mouth. And for the first time in my life, I saw Jerry Owens with nothing to say.
A school family tree with one extra name gave one grandmother the length of a supper to bring her husband back to the truth in Broken Arrow.
I gave my terms in the doorway of that dining room, with my family tree in my hand and my back as straight as I could make it. “Jerry, sit down. I will not make a scene in front of a baby. But you will tell me, and Lynn, and Sara, and our son, the truth of how long this has gone on and who has paid for what. You will do it tonight, in this house, and when you are done, I will decide what happens next. Mike, please sit beside your mother. You are going to explain what you knew.”
Jerry lowered himself into the chair like a man of ninety. “Pat, I met Lynn in 1985, at a conference in Oklahoma City,” he said, in a small voice. “Sara was born the next year. I could not choose, and I did not want to hurt anyone, and so I hurt everyone. I paid for this house with the money from the sale of the land of your mother. I told myself it was an investment.” Mike spoke from beside me, hoarse. “Mom, I found out when I was twenty. I should have told you. I was a coward.”
But Jerry could not bear the look on the face of his son, and he did the only thing he had ever known how to do when cornered. He leaped up, snatched the deed to the house and the bank statements from the sideboard, the papers that showed where the money had gone, and ran for the back door, meaning to cross the yard and drive away in his silver sedan before anyone could stop him. A chair crashed over. The baby began to wail. And in the kitchen doorway, Lynn Dillard stood with a wooden spoon in her hand.
Jerry stopped in the kitchen with the papers pressed to his shirt, Lynn in front of him with her spoon, Sara on one side, Mike closing in behind him, and the pot roast bubbling on the stove. Lynn spoke quietly, the tears running down her face. “Jerry, you have lied to me for forty years too. I thought your wife was a cold woman who did not love you. She just walked into my house and sat at my table and asked for the truth. You will give her those papers.” Jerry looked at the two women, and then at the floor. He placed the papers in my hand.
The consequences were hard and sorrowful. I asked a judge for a legal separation, and then a divorce, and the court divided the property fairly, with the house in Jenks going to Lynn, which was only just. Jerry moved into a small rented apartment in Tulsa, alone, and for the first time in his life he cooked his own supper. Mike apologized to me every Sunday for six months, and I let him, until one Sunday I told him that I had forgiven him, and he wept in my kitchen like a child.
In the name of my mother Dolores, who passed in 2010, I started the Dolores Whitaker Fund. It pays for counseling and legal help for people who discover a hidden second family or a hidden debt, and for the children of such families who need a place to be heard, in Tulsa, Wagoner and Creek counties. In the first year we counseled one hundred and fifty one adults and sixty two young people. One was a fifty five year old man from Broken Arrow who sat with his half sister for the first time and said that for forty years he had felt a missing chair at every table.
On a bright Saturday in the autumn, I sat in the stands at a school field in Broken Arrow, in a folding chair and a wool blanket, watching my granddaughter Lily run across the grass with a soccer ball. Mike sat on one side of me, and Sara, who had come to the game with her baby, sat on the other. When Lily scored, all three of us leaped up and cheered. Lily ran to the sideline, waving, and shouted, “Grandma! Did you see?” I told her that I had seen everything, and that I was proud, and that I always would be.
