Page 56 of A Matter of Time

“My mom, she got pregnant in high school and put him up for adoption. She never thought for a second that she’d end up meeting her high school sweetheart again years later and falling in love with him all over again.”

“Wait…what?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “I mean, here are these two kids that both run like hell from their hometown and end up meeting a world away.”

“You’re going way too fast,” I told him. “Pretend I’m drunk.”

He laughed at me. “You’re really funny.”

I gave him a fake laugh. “Just back up.”

So he explained it slowly for the impaired. Susan Pomeroy and Daniel Reid had been high school sweethearts. Halfway through their senior year she had gotten pregnant. She never told him, she just disappeared. Her mother, Lynn Pomeroy, who did not believe in abortion, sent Susan to live with her sister in Atlanta for the duration of the pregnancy. When the baby was born, he was put up for adoption. Susan finished high school there and went on to college. Daniel went to college on a football scholarship. Both of them wanted to save the world, and so both joined the Peace Corps. They met again in Somalia, digging ditches, doing relief work. Their chemistry was rekindled almost instantly, and they reunited as though they’d never parted.

I nodded after several minutes. “It’s a good story.”

“I know. It’s totally a Lifetime original movie.”

I smiled at him. He was funny too. “How does it end?”

“They moved back to their hometown to open a solar paneling company.”

“Cool.”

“They also put up windmills, and we raise our own food and… What?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Just say.”

“I figured you for a farm boy, Dallas or not.”

He chuckled. “It’s gotta be more than that. You look like you’re ready to throw up.”

“No.”

He smiled at me. “So, anyway, my mom.” He took a deep breath. “Like, six months ago, she all of a sudden calls a family meeting and just brings out all these papers and lays the news on my dad, and the rest of us, that she gave her first son up for adoption.”

I stared at him.

“And my dad felt sorry for her until she told him the baby was his.”

“Oh.” I exhaled.

“Yeah. He took it really hard. And if you knew him, you’d get it. I mean, his family… Nothing’s as important as us, ya know? He just… It almost killed him to think his son was out in the world without him. He was just sick thinking that maybe Dane had been hurt and there was no one there to protect him.”

I nodded. “Well, they gotta know that wasn’t the case. His parents…they adored him.”

“Sure.”

“He turned out all right. Everything turned out all right.”

“Yeah, they know. Turns out my mom knew everything about Dane. It was an open adoption because that was the only way she would consent.”

“So she should be okay.”

“Yeah, but she’s not, and neither is the old man. They gotta see him.”

“So they should just come and see him.”