Past Transgressions

We headed out to my rental car and she navigated while we chatted. The coffee shop was a local one that had a good selection of very nice brews. Thank god it was not the chain that burns the shit out of their beans. We got a quiet corner and started talking. I explained what had happened thirty years ago from my point of view. I held nothing back. I was brutally honest about why I never saw her mother again. She listened and asked a few questions.

One of those questions was, "Why did you get in touch with my mother again after all these years?"

My answer was just as brutally honest. I told her about the death of my wife. Her eyes grew very big and she put her hand on mine when she heard how suddenly she died. I explained that I handled it for about a week and then crawled into a bottle of Jack Daniels. OK, lots of bottles of Jack Daniels. I explained how the message from her mother forced me to look at myself in the mirror and make a decision. Was I going to continue to drink myself to death or was I going to try and live?

I chose to live. I explained that it was her mother that pulled me up and forced me to live again. I even told her that I proposed to her, several times over those two days. She asked and I was honest and I said that I had indeed had sex with her mother over the course of her visit. I told her about the hole in my heart and although her mother had not healed it completely, she had gone a long way towards healing it.

For her part, Adele was honest in explaining how hard it was to grow up without a father. She had finally started just telling people that her father was dead. That was why she made a stupid mistake in getting married too young and then getting pregnant right away. She was now divorced and was just looking forward to being all she could be to her son.

The coffee shop was closing, so we walked back to her condo and talked until the wee hours of the morning. She said I was too tired to drive back to the hotel so she fixed up the pull out bed in the couch and I slept there. In the morning, she fixed breakfast and I headed back to the hotel.

We have stayed in touch, phone calls, emails, text messages. She has sent pictures of my grandson. I have shared pictures of my son, his wife and my granddaughter. Next week she is coming with my grandson to visit. I haven't told her yet, but we are going to take a drive to see my son and his family so that he can meet his formerly unknown sister and his equally unknown nephew. I hope this works out.