CHAPTER 16: “SIT DOWN, I WANT TO TELL YOU SOMETHING”

BRRRINNNG! The phone was annoyingly loud. Since I was the closest, I grabbed the receiver.

“Hello!” I said in my high-pitched twelve-year-old-boy voice.

“Shirley?” a man on the other end of the line growled.

“No, this is Greg, her son,” I said, correcting the unknown caller with a twinge of embarrassment creeping into my voice.

“You sound like a girl,” the man declared matter-of-factly. But before I could protest, he continued, “This is George Stier. Let me talk to your brother.”

There it was again: a double-barreled shotgun of insult. First, he told me I sounded like a girl, and then, once again, he wanted to talk to my brother —not me.

“Doug!” I yelled, trying to lower my Vienna Boys’ Choir pitch down to a bass, or at least a baritone.

I handed the phone to Doug. “It’s George Stier,” I said. I never used the word dad when talking about him. It just didn’t sound right.

While Doug launched into his conversation with George, I marched over to Ma. She was sitting at our round, white kitchen table smoking. She was halfway through her first pack of Benson and Hedges Golds, and the day was still young. I stood awkwardly next to her for a moment, summoning my courage.

“Ma, can I ask you a question about something that’s really bothering me?”

“Sure. What?” she said turning toward me while contorting her lips so that her cigarette smoke blew off toward the refrigerator instead of toward me. Ma —like most other smokers of her day —wouldn’t have dreamed of stepping outside to light up. She did, however, usually exercise the common courtesy of not blowing her cancer cloud straight at you.

“Why does George Stier never want to talk to me?” I demanded. “When he calls, he only wants to talk to Doug!” When she didn’t reply, I forged ahead. “And why do you always call him ‘Doug’s dad’? He’s my dad too! He hates me, but he’s my dad.”

Ma looked away from me uncomfortably and fixed her gaze straight ahead. She took a long drag from her cigarette, then exhaled. But this time she blew the smoke straight ahead across the table. It was almost as if she was looking at someone sitting there across from her. Someone she wanted to take direct aim at.

“Sit down. I want to tell you something,” she said, turning her gaze back toward me and drilling into me with her piercing, sad blue eyes.

Nervously, I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. I sensed I was about to learn something I didn’t really want to know —but that I needed to know.

Ma ground out her cigarette in the giant green ashtray. Then she swallowed hard. Staring straight into my eyes, she said, “George Stier is not your father. Your father’s name is Toney Woods. I met him at . . .” Ma continued to talk, but I’d stopped listening. Like a hard punch to your solar plexus that drops you to your knees and leaves you breathless —my uncle Jack had taught me that —I felt like the oxygen had left my lungs.

I must have heard her wrong.

Gathering my wits, I asked, “Ma, what did you just say?”

“George Stier is not your dad. Your dad’s name is Toney Woods,” she said articulating each word slowly and loudly, irritated that I’d made her repeat a truth she’d been trying to hide for over a decade.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Why did he leave us?” I demanded.

“I don’t really want to talk about it, Greg!” she barked. “It’s hard enough to tell you this without dragging up all the details!”

“Ma!” I yelled, “You kept this a secret from me for all these years, and you wait until I’m twelve to tell me this?”

Normally, Ma wouldn’t take this kind of verbal berating from anyone, but this time she just looked down at the table and kept smoking. But I wasn’t done. I could feel the anger rising up inside me.

“All these years I thought George Stier was my dad. You gave me his last name!” I yelled. “No wonder he never wanted to talk to me! I’m not his son! And now you don’t want to tell me about my real dad because it brings up bad memories for you! Well, too bad, Ma!”

In all my years, I had never talked to my ma like this, but I was beyond furious. I was enraged. Yet instead of grabbing me or slapping me or threatening me, she just sat there silently puffing on her cigarette, shame clearly written across her face.

Then it hit me. All of this has ramifications far beyond who my dad is. It means my brother isn’t really my full-blooded brother. My anger drained away and an overwhelming sadness swept through me.

Tears spilled out of my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.

“I’m sorry to tell you like this, Greg,” Ma said gently, putting her hand on my shoulder in a feeble effort to console me. “I should have told you this years ago, but I didn’t know what to say.”

But I was beyond comforting. I sobbed uncontrollably.

“Are you upset that George Stier is not your dad?” Ma asked.

“No!” I said between sobs. “This means Doug and I aren’t full-blooded brothers! He’s not my real brother!”

Doug was off the phone and had been listening quietly from the corner of the kitchen. “I’m your brother, you dork,” he said in his no-nonsense way.

And somehow, I was comforted. His blunt words helped me think more clearly.

Full-blooded or not, he is my real brother.

Ma got up and grabbed me a couple of tissues. By the time I finished blowing my nose, my sobbing subsided. I pulled myself together. Now I was curious instead of crushed.

“Tell me more about my dad, Ma,” I pleaded. “What was he like? What did he do? What did he look like?” But Ma didn’t have many answers, so she offered a compromise. “I tell you what,” she said. “Toney’s sister-in-law, Tess, lives here in town. We keep in contact. I’ll see if we can go to her house, and you can ask her whatever you want.”

Ma got up, walked over to the rotary phone, looked up Tess’s number in the little book she kept next to it, and dialed.

“Hey, Tess, this is Shirley,” she said, like she was talking to an old friend.

The room went quiet while Ma listened to Tess on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, I’m doing good. You?” Ma said.

Although I could faintly hear the sound of Tess’s voice, I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

“Well, I just told Greg about Toney, and he’s got questions,” Ma said, glancing in my direction. “He’s pretty upset.”

You got that right!

“Can we all get together, and maybe he can ask you some questions about Toney?” Ma asked.

I heard Tess’s muffled reply. “Sure,” she said.

A thrill of excitement went through me.

“How about next Saturday night?” Ma asked.

“Sure,” Tess said again.

Over the next week, the hours ticked by slowly. It was like waiting for Christmas to hurry up and get here. Saturday night would be an unveiling, like wrapping paper being stripped away, piece by piece, until you discovered the surprise inside. Hopefully, the visit with Tess would provide answers to some of the big questions that had been swirling around inside me for years. Who am I really? And whose am I really?

On Saturday night, Ma and I pulled into Tess’s driveway. Silently, we got out of the car and walked to the door. Ma pushed the doorbell and waited. It seemed like minutes, though it was probably just a matter of seconds before Tess opened the door.

“Shirley!” Tess said in greeting.

“Tess, how are you?” Ma asked.

“Pretty good. Come on in! And this must be Greg,” she said, smothering me in an uncomfortably long hug. “He looks like you both!”

“I know, I know. He’s got his dad’s nose,” Ma said.

Tess handed me a Coke and said, “Why don’t you sit over there and watch TV while your mom and I catch up? Then you can join us and ask me any questions you want about your dad.”

I quietly made my way over to the television, but I wasn’t alone. There was another kid there whose name I didn’t know. He didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way, even though I sat down just three feet from him.

Tess and Ma took their seats in the little kitchenette across the room. They lit up cigarettes, drank coffee, and caught up. It was obvious that, at some point, they had been really good friends. After a few minutes, they lowered their voices to almost a whisper. I strained to hear what they were saying, but the TV was too loud. I guessed they were hatching a coordinated plan about how much to tell me about my father.

Since I couldn’t hear what they were saying and the TV program was boring, I turned my attention to the other kid. It didn’t take me long to conclude that he had significant intellectual disabilities, but what he was doing was more interesting than what was on TV.

The kid, who must have been related to me somehow, was playing with a contraption that consisted of two socks tied to a stick. Both socks were weighted with something inside them. Each time he spun the socks on the stick, he would emit sounds of excitement that culminated in a yell of pure delight. The faster the socks spun around on the stick, the more excited he got. Somehow, the weighted socks looked like they were rotating in opposite directions. It was totally baffling to me how that was even possible.

It suddenly struck me how strange this situation was. On one side of the room sat this boy who was absolutely exhilarated to watch his homemade toy spin, while on the other side of the room, my birth, life, dad, identity, and personal history were being discussed by the only two women on the planet who knew the real story.

“Greg, come over here,” Ma finally said.

The other kid paid no attention to my departure. He just kept spinning and yelling with delight.

I made my way over to my ma and Tess.

“I have something to show you,” Tess said. She handed me a carefully preserved newspaper article. “Your dad was a war hero.”

She’s exaggerating, of course, I thought.

I sat down between her and Ma and looked closer at the clipping in my hand. My eyes were immediately drawn to the photograph. It was a picture of my dad riding in the back of an open car in the middle of a ticker-tape parade.

Maybe she isn’t exaggerating.

I started reading the article. The further I read, the more impressed I was. Toney Woods, my biological father, was not just a veteran of the Korean War. He was the very last prisoner of war to be released from captivity after the war was over. He’d spent three years in the worst possible conditions as a POW.

“When your dad came back to Sacramento,” Tess explained, “which is where most of us in the Woods family lived then, he returned as a celebrated war hero. This photo here was taken on the day he received the Prisoner of War Medal for his valor and endurance.”

Impressive.

“Not only that,” Tess added, bragging further on his behalf, “your father was promoted to sergeant major after his release.”

At the time I had no clue what that meant. But later I looked up the rank of sergeant major and learned that this was the highest rank enlisted soldiers could attain in the army. Uncle Dave, who was an army vet himself, told me that while every sergeant major is respected, those who have actually seen action are even more respected. “If your dad was a prisoner of war,” Uncle Dave assured me, “he was at the top of the food chain when it comes to war heroes.”

“How did my father die?” I asked Tess.

“He had complications in heart surgery,” she answered. “He was only fifty years old when he died.”

“He died young,” Ma said.

“Do you have any other questions?” Tess asked.

“No,” I said. But really, I did.

There were all sorts of questions exploding like fireworks inside my head. How did my ma and dad meet? Were they ever married? Why did he leave us? Did Ma beat him up too, as she did Paul? What was he really like? Do you think he would have liked me?

But I didn’t dare ask any of these questions that were burning in my twelve-year-old soul. While I suspected Tess would know the answers, I sensed that this entire conversation had opened a gaping wound in my ma.

Since we’d arrived, Ma had been smoking cigarette after cigarette. If she’d played poker, fast smoking would have been her tell. Ma had grown increasingly agitated as the conversation progressed. All this talk about her past and about my birth had made her twitchy, so I just backed off.

After a few more minutes of small talk, we all said goodbye. I glanced over at the kid in the corner. I said goodbye to him, but he didn’t notice —he was still spinning the stick with both hands, erupting periodically in joyful laughter.

Ma and I got in the car and drove back toward our apartment. Ma turned on the oldies station and chain-smoked. Rolling down the passenger side window, I peered out into the night, processing what I’d just learned.

I suspected Ma was still hiding something. Something she didn’t want me to know.

What was she so ashamed of? Would whatever the secret was be even harder to hear? Would it help me better understand my story? Or deepen my insecurities?

Learning that my father was a decorated war hero had made me proud. But there was still an important piece of the puzzle missing. It would take another conversation before I would start getting the real answers I was still longing for.

And those answers would be hard to hear.