My uncle’s will left everything to a daughter who drowned in 1998.
Tuesday morning she signed in at the lawyer’s office ahead of me.
Same last name. SAME BIRTHDAY.
Dale raised me from the time I was nine, after my dad took a job in Tulsa and quit calling. He kept a bag of birdseed in the bed of his truck for two years and never filled a single feeder.
The story I grew up on was that his daughter Bethany drowned at Cheney Lake, three years old, and that’s why he and Aunt Cheryl never tried again.
My grandmother Darlene still keeps her picture on the hall table.
So when the woman ahead of me wrote Bethany Reinhardt on the sign-in sheet, I told myself it was a common enough name in this county.
Then the receptionist asked for her ID and she said her birthday out loud.
April 6th, 1994.
I sat two chairs down and looked up the drowning on my phone while Mr. Prewitt got everyone settled. There was an Eagle piece from that July about a child pulled from the lake, no name, no follow-up.
I checked the state death index. NO RECORD.
Nothing.
Aunt Cheryl came in, saw the woman, and set her purse on the floor instead of the table.
“Brandon, move down,” my mother said, and she wouldn’t look at either of them.
Prewitt started reading and got to a trust that had been funded since 2011. Fifteen years of payments into an account in Oklahoma.
“Dale set this up himself,” Prewitt said. “He was specific that the name be read aloud.”
He read it, and my grandmother made a sound I have never heard a person make.
Cheryl stood so fast her chair hit the wall.
“HE PROMISED ME HE WOULD NEVER DO THIS,” she said.
SHE WAS NEVER IN THAT LAKE. Dale signed papers in October of 1998 and drove her across the state line himself.
I was still holding the visitor badge they made me wear at the front desk.
Bethany hadn’t moved the whole time. She was looking at me, not at Cheryl.
Then she reached into her bag and put an envelope on the table with Dale’s handwriting across the front.
“He wrote this in 2011,” she said. “Your name is in the second paragraph, and you need to hear what your mother agreed to.”
What My Mother’s Face Did Right Then
She didn’t deny it.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. My mother, Karen Howell, who once drove forty minutes to return two dollars in incorrect change to a gas station cashier, who cried at the Hallmark Channel and called it allergies, who made me write apology notes to teachers in cursive – she heard Bethany say your mother agreed to and she looked at the table.
Not at me. Not at Cheryl. At the table.
Prewitt asked if anyone needed a moment. Nobody answered him. Bethany slid the envelope toward the center of the table and left her hand on it, flat, like she was holding something down.
Darlene was still making that sound, quieter now. More like breathing than crying.
I set the visitor badge on the chair next to me. I don’t know why I remember that.
The Second Paragraph
Prewitt asked if Bethany wanted to read it herself or have him do it.
“Him,” she said.
It was two pages, handwritten, Dale’s cramped left-handed print that I’d seen on birthday cards and grocery lists my whole life. Prewitt smoothed it out and put on his glasses and the room got very still.
The first paragraph was about Bethany. Where she’d been, who raised her. A woman named Gail Prentiss in Woodward, Oklahoma, a retired school librarian who had taken in the girl Dale brought to her door in the fall of 1998 and never asked him for a single thing in return. Bethany grew up knowing Dale was her father. She knew about the lake story. She’d been told to wait.
Then Prewitt turned the page.
Brandon is my sister Karen’s boy and I raised him as my own from the time he was nine. I want him to know that was not a debt I paid. That was the best years of my life and I would do it again from any starting point. What I am writing next is not meant to hurt him. It is meant to make sure he is the only one in that room who leaves knowing the full truth, because he has earned it and the others have not.
Cheryl sat back down.
Karen knew about Bethany before she brought Brandon to me. Cheryl had told her. The arrangement was that Karen would not speak of it, would not ask questions, and in exchange I would take the boy and raise him right. Karen agreed. She signed something to that effect, which Mr. Prewitt has on file. I am not saying Karen is a bad person. I am saying Brandon deserves to know that his mother made a choice about what he would and would not be told, and that choice was not made by me alone.
Prewitt stopped.
He looked at me over his glasses.
I said, “Keep going.”
I should have told him myself. I kept thinking there would be a better time and then I ran out of time, which is what happens. Bethany knows who she is. Brandon should know who he is too. He’s my son in every way that mattered. He’s also Bethany’s brother in every way that matters now. What they do with that is up to them. I just didn’t want either of them walking out of that room still carrying something that wasn’t theirs to carry.
That was the end of it.
What Cheryl Said to the Wall
She didn’t say it to any of us. She turned her chair slightly, just a few degrees, and said it to the window or the wall or nothing in particular.
“I couldn’t have another one. After what happened. After what he did, I couldn’t even try.”
Nobody responded.
“He told me she was gone. I believed him for six months. Then I found a deposit slip.” She stopped. “I stayed anyway. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.”
Darlene reached over and put her hand on Cheryl’s arm and Cheryl looked at it like she’d never seen a hand before.
My mother still hadn’t looked at me.
I thought about the birdseed. Two years in the bed of that truck, getting rained on, drying out, getting rained on again. I used to ask Dale why he never put it in a feeder and he’d say he was waiting until he found the right spot. I was maybe eleven. I thought that was a reasonable answer.
I don’t think that was about birdseed.
What Bethany Said After
Prewitt excused himself to get water nobody had asked for. Good instinct on his part.
Bethany looked at me again. She’d been doing that, checking in, like she was watching to see if I was going to break or bolt.
I wasn’t. I don’t know what I was doing but it wasn’t that.
“Gail died in 2019,” she said. “Dale came to the funeral. That’s the only time I saw him in person after I was three. He stood in the back and left before the reception.” She paused. “He looked like you.”
I didn’t know what to do with that so I just let it sit there.
“I have pictures,” she said. “From when I was little. He sent them through Gail. There’s one of you and him at what looks like a state fair.”
“Sedgwick County,” I said. “I was twelve. He let me eat a corn dog at nine in the morning and told me not to tell my mother.”
She smiled. Small. Like she’d been rationing them.
“That sounds right,” she said.
What My Mother Finally Said
She waited until Bethany went to the restroom and Cheryl and Darlene were in the hallway. Then she turned to me.
“I thought it was the kindest thing,” she said. “At the time.”
I looked at her.
“You’d already lost your father. I didn’t want you to feel like Dale’s family was – complicated. I wanted it to be simple for you.”
“Mom.”
“I know.”
“You signed something.”
“I know, Brandon.”
“You signed something that said you wouldn’t tell me.”
She folded her hands on the table. She has a ring on her right hand that belonged to Darlene, a thin gold thing she’s worn so long it’s basically part of her finger.
“He was so good to you,” she said. “I didn’t want to make it strange.”
I thought about every Christmas. Every time Dale showed up at a school thing. Every time he fixed something in whatever apartment we were living in without being asked, just showed up with tools and a bag from McDonald’s and got to work. I thought about him teaching me to drive in the parking lot of a closed Kmart, how patient he was, how he never once grabbed the dashboard even when I deserved it.
I thought about him knowing, the whole time, that there was another kid out there in Woodward. Getting birthday cards maybe. Getting deposits in an account. Getting a letter in 2011 that told her to wait.
I don’t know if that makes him a good man who did a bad thing or a complicated man who did the best he could with a situation that was already broken by the time I arrived in it.
Probably both. Probably that’s just what people are.
The Parking Lot
Bethany and I walked out together. Not planned, just the same direction.
Her car was a gray Civic with an Oklahoma plate and a dent in the rear quarter panel that had been there long enough to rust at the edges. She had Dale’s forehead. I could see it in the parking lot light, that same flat shelf above the eyebrows. I probably have it too.
“Do you want to get coffee?” she said. “Not right now. I don’t mean right now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not right now.”
She nodded. She got her keys out.
“He talked about you,” she said. “In the letter. Not just the second paragraph. There’s more. I didn’t think Prewitt needed to read all of it.”
I didn’t ask what it said. I figured I’d hear it eventually. From her, which is probably how Dale wanted it.
She drove out first. I sat in my truck for a while. There was nothing in the bed of it, no birdseed, nothing, just the rubber mat and an old receipt from a hardware store.
I don’t know what I’m going to say to my mother yet. I don’t know what Cheryl does now, or Darlene, or any of them.
But I have a sister. She’s thirty years old and she grew up in Woodward and she has Dale’s forehead and a dented gray Civic and she said that sounds right when I told her about the corn dog, and she smiled like she’d been saving it.
I think that’s where I’m starting from.
—
If this one got to you, pass it along to someone who knew a Dale.
If you found this tale intriguing, you might also be captivated by My Father’s Watch Just Walked Into a Pawn Shop or the mystery of The Grocery Bags Appeared on My Porch Every Monday for Six Months. And for another unsettling family secret, check out My Mother Weighed 98 Pounds. Then I Found the Camera I Didn’t Put There..
