In the spring, Shane found himself unemployed and living at the mercy of a girl whose face he couldn’t recall.  Candace had a cheap walk-up in Columbia Heights, two rooms with a microwave and a toilet and neighbors whose culinary cultures insisted they cook cabbage or beans or curry night and day, reminding him of the turnip greens and fatback on his grandmother’s stove and the first time he realized where that fatback came from.  School released its wards early one cold March day, and Shane returned home to find his father and uncles with a chainsaw, carving a pig strung between two trees, creeks of blood snaking through the dust in the yard and pooling under the porch of his grandmother’s trailer.

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I always knew you thought I was crazy.  I imagined the way you probably talked to your friends about me, telling everyone how I cut her pictures out of our photo albums when—how could I not?—she had nearly destroyed me, us, any possible future.  And she was in so many pictures, huddled there with her face pressed against your shoulder, her arm around our only child.

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My beautician May-Belle feels sorry for them.  She says God’ll be in the middle of creating something new or performing some latter-day miracle, and something will come up that Saint Peter, Saint Michael, or even the Virgin Mary Herself can’t handle, and God will just have to go.  Being God, He can’t kill or destroy the unfinished under His hand.

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When I was a child my days were wild and unpredictable, and I sometimes miss the peaks of emotion present in that old life. Most of the time I abhor the drama of my past when my life centered on the loudness of my hard-drinking parents. But that day in the still young wilderness of Milwaukee County’s Schlitz Audubon Center with DJ, during our quiet moments, I wondered if the life we’d built for our last child, this last-chance-to-get-parenting-right son, held all the joy and excitement we wished for him. Was our life too quiet and too correct? [Read more →]

It was late January when he called. Said his mother had died. I was shocked and told him how sorry I was and if there was anything I could do for him. I had just seen her in October, during the Series, and she looked fine. He said no, I didn’t understand. It was his birth mother. I didn’t know he knew her – I mean her name and whereabouts. He never let on that he did.

“All the research I’ve done just shows his adopted parents – Edward and Sarah Shepard. There’s no public record of his natural parents. The papers were sealed by the courts when he was adopted. So you know who his real mother was … and his father?” [Read more →]