Doug stood in the doorway of the room with a coffee cup in each hand, and the steam rose between us like a curtain. He set the cups down on the dresser very slowly. “Dad,” he said, “I will tell her. The girl in that photograph is named Katie. She is my daughter.” The Twins game murmured on the muted television. My father turned his face to the window. I am Sharon Lindgren, sixty one years old, and I sat down on the edge of the bed with the checkbook open on my knee, and the long, dusty lie of my whole family unrolled in front of me.
It came out in pieces. In the summer of 1978, my brother Doug was twenty, working the summer on a ranch near Reno, and he met a waitress named Marlene Sorensen. By fall she was expecting. Doug came home to Sioux Falls in October, white faced, and told our parents. My mother, who feared what the church would say, and my father, who feared what the church would say about my mother, agreed that Doug would be sent to college in Brookings and nothing more would ever be spoken of it.
“Dad paid because I begged him to,” Doug said, in a small, flat voice. “Marlene wanted me to marry her. I could not do it. I was twenty, and scared, and ashamed, and Mom told me I would ruin the family. So Dad sent a check every month, and I told myself that was the same as being a father.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I have seen Katie exactly twice, from a rental car across the street from her school. I never had the courage to get out.”
A second checkbook found in a garage gave one milk truck driver daughter the length of a baseball game to bring her brother back to the truth in Sioux Falls.
I gave my terms in that little room, with the old man silent in his recliner. “Doug, here is what happens. Tomorrow I am calling the number on that checkbook, and I will find Marlene, and I will find Katie. You will be standing beside me when I do. The three million seven hundred thousand dollars will be divided four ways, among you, me, and Katie, with the fourth share going to the home that is caring for Dad. And you are going to get out of that rental car, Doug. You are sixty three years old. It is time you walked up to the door.”
My brother pressed his knuckles against his mouth and nodded, and a sob escaped him. My father stirred in the recliner, looked at the two of us with eyes the color of faded denim, and spoke at last in a cracked bass. “Your mother wanted to tell you both,” he said. “Every Christmas she said, Arne, we have to tell them. But I was afraid you would stop loving her. I paid because I could not do anything else.” He lifted one trembling hand toward Doug. “I should have paid in courage.”
But the old fear rose in Doug like a tide. He suddenly snatched the checkbook and the photograph from my lap, and bolted for the hallway, plainly meaning to destroy them before anyone could pick up a telephone. He ran past the nurse station. An aide named Dolores held out both arms across the hall. An old man in a walker, a retired barber, wheeled sideways to block the exit. Two ladies in housecoats from the card room stood up together. And the night nurse locked the double doors with a click.
Doug stopped at the end of the long hallway with the checkbook crushed against his chest, and the pale glow of the exit sign washing over him. The old barber on his walker spoke first, in a dry prairie drawl. “Son, I have been sitting in this hall for six years, watching men come to visit their fathers. I never once saw one run from the room.” Doug stood trembling. Then he turned, walked the long hallway back to the door of my father, and knelt on the carpet beside the recliner, placing the photograph in the hands of the old man.
The consequences were tender and a little frightening. The next morning I dialed the number, and a woman answered in a voice rough from forty years of cigarettes. Marlene Sorensen listened to my name and then said, simply, “I wondered when someone would call.” Katie flew to Sioux Falls that weekend, a forty five year old nurse in a denim jacket, with the cowgirl hat of her childhood tucked in her bag. She stood in the doorway of the room, looked at her father, and said, “Hello. I am Katie.”
In the name of my mother Ingrid, who passed in 2015, I started the Ingrid Lindgren Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of dairy farm families and for travel costs for estranged relatives who want to reunite, in Minnehaha, Lincoln and Turner counties. In the first year we sent fifteen students to college and paid for the travel of forty four people to see family they had not seen in years. One was a seventy year old man from Canton who flew to Seattle to meet a brother, and who stood in the airport holding a bouquet.
On a golden evening in September, we all gathered at the falls, where the pink quartzite glowed in the last of the light and the water thundered beneath the rail. My father sat in his wheelchair at the front, a blanket across his knees. Katie stood on one side with her arm around his shoulder, and Doug stood on the other, awkwardly, holding a bouquet he had no idea how to hold. My father looked at the two of them, at the falls, at me. “Well,” he said, in his slow bass voice, “that is a fine picture.”
