The man standing next to me in the photograph was Buddy Lasater, and every person in Joplin knew his face. It had been on the billboards along Range Line Road since before I was born. Buddy Lasater Chevrolet, the Honest Man Dealer. His smile looked down from a sign above the interstate, and his voice had read the radio commercials for fifty years. In the photograph he was young and tan, in a plaid sport coat, kneeling on the lawn of a rental house with his hand on the shoulder of a four year old girl in a pink dress. The girl was me. On the back, in the pencil of my uncle, only a date. 1972.
I took the filing box to my kitchen table and went through it one folder at a time. The first folder held receipts. Hundreds of them, in carbon copy, each one for three hundred dollars, signed in the neat hand of a young woman. Janice Kimble. My mother. Every month, from September 1971 to May 1989, Buddy Lasater had sent my mother three hundred dollars, in cash, by way of her brother Carl. The second folder held a bank book, in my name, opened in 1971, and in it, my uncle had deposited every penny that my mother had refused to touch. It came to three hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.
The last item in the box was a letter on lined notebook paper, in the shaky hand of Carl. Rhonda, your mother was proud and stubborn and she would not take a dime from that man. She said you were hers. So I took it and put it away for you, because a child ought to have something from the father who would not own her. He asked me to raise you quietly, and he asked me many times to tell you. I told him that it was not my place. Janice made me promise. I am sorry I could not do more. I always loved you like my own. Carl.
A hidden door behind garage cobwebs gave one niece the weekend to bring a father and daughter together in Joplin.
I looked up Buddy Lasater on the computer. He was eighty eight, a widower, living in a house on Connor Avenue, retired from the dealership he had sold to his two sons. I wrote him a short letter and mailed it that same night. Three days later, a younger man in a pressed shirt rang the bell of my house in the middle of the afternoon. He introduced himself as Randy Lasater, the elder son, and he carried a leather folder under his arm. “Ms. Kimble, my father is not well,” he said. “We would like to settle this privately.” He took out a document that said, in bold letters, Confidentiality Agreement.
I read the first paragraph, and I laid the document on the porch rail. “Mr. Lasater, my uncle kept a hidden box for thirty years,” I said. “My mother never signed a paper with your father, and neither will I.” The face of Randy reddened. He stepped toward me and reached for the filing box on the porch table, as if to take it. But my husband Dale, who is six feet two and has driven a delivery truck for thirty years, stepped out of the front door and stood between them with a glass of tea in his hand. “Son, I would not,” he said mildly. Randy stood very still. Then he put the folder back under his arm and walked down the steps.
Buddy Lasater called me himself that night. His voice was thin and cracked, not the voice of the radio. “Rhonda, I have waited my whole life for you to call,” he said. “I begged your mother to let me claim you. She said no. I was a coward. I let her say no.” He started to cry. I let him cry. I had planned a hundred speeches over the last few days, hard ones, cold ones. None of them came out. “Mr. Lasater, I would like to see you,” I said instead. “Not with a lawyer. Just you. On a bench somewhere. I want to see if I have your hands.”
We met on a bench at Landreth Park on a Tuesday morning. A frail old man in a tan jacket, with a cane across his knees, rose from the bench as I came up the path. I did not know what I would feel. I felt a quiet. We sat down, and he took my hand and turned it over, and he studied my palm. Then he laid his own beside it. The same long thumbs. The same crooked little finger. “There you are,” he said. We sat there for two hours and watched the ducks. I did not call him Dad. I did not need to. It was enough to be sitting there.
The money consequences were handled by honest people. The bank account of my uncle passed to me, in full, with interest, three hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and I put a third of it toward a house for my daughter and a third toward the retirement of Dale. Buddy Lasater changed his will the following week to include me and my children, and his sons contested it for a month and then withdrew. I did not take the money for myself. I gave it to a fund for children at the Hickory Inn, where my mother had waited tables, and I named it for her.
In the name of my uncle Carl, who passed in April and who kept a hidden door for thirty years, I started the Cobweb Corner Fund. It pays for legal help, DNA testing and counseling for families in Jasper, Newton and Barry counties who are searching for fathers, mothers or siblings lost in the silence of old shame. In the first year, we helped thirty one families. A man of fifty three, in a work shirt with his name above the pocket, sat in the office and said, “I just want to know whose nose this is.” I said that we would find out.
In November, Buddy and I stood together in the garage of Uncle Carl, which had been swept at last, and which smelled of clean concrete and motor oil. The little door in the corner stood open, painted the same gray as the block. I had hung a picture inside, in a simple frame. It was the photograph from the filing box, of a man kneeling on a lawn beside a four year old girl in pink. Beside it I had pinned a small brass plate. Carl, who watched the door. Buddy ran his finger over it. “He was the best of us,” he said. I agreed.
