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Finding Our Way, With Detours
By the time I found Dave, I’d also formed some patterns of my own — like walking away before a fight gets unpleasant. I can see that it cost me dearly in a few situations, and I’m puzzling over it today.
Surprisingly, my marriage to R was not one of the three. I’m sorry that my own naiveté led me to expecting him to be a wiser, more stable, more productive parent than he could offer. As I’ve worked more as a novelist, I’ve come to grasp the plot lines of people’s stories differently: Despite R’s sophisticated grasp of obscure philosophy and his rapidly gained skills in gunsmithing and “hand loading” his own ammunition, he knew little about family life. His “older sister” tended his childhood, his “mother” had a thyroid disorder that caused her to explode often, and his “father” spent his life on the road, selling barber supplies from a truck.
When the supposed parents died and I accidentally saw that his “older sister” had a driver’s license in a different name, the truth emerged: His “sister” was actually his birth mother, with no father listed. She said little as she embraced R and invited him to call her “Mother” at last — he was 31 years old, one moment believing himself to be an orphan, and the next, embracing a reserved and intelligent beautician as his parent.
