(Continued from August 9)
“My mother told me a story she told me never to repeatl. But I am eighty years old, and I can’t leave this world without telling you the truth about your great-grandmother.”
Was this some sort of trick? How had she gotten my cell phone number?
“Your great-grandmother was German. Her hair was really thin. So thin that she used to save the extra hair from her brush to thicken her bun.”
This tiny detail made me laugh, but it also made a lump in my throat and told me she might be telling the truth. Thin hair ran on the female side of my family.
But my father’s pragmatic skepticism grew in my belly. Never trust a stranger.
“My daughter, Sandy, has done a lot of genealogy research. That’s how I found you. She’s a retired teacher from Rutherford High School. She taught math.”
I could Google the truth of that statement pretty quickly.
Still, that didn’t explain how she knew my cell phone number.
“Sandy would like to meet you.”
What harm could there be in meeting a retired math teacher from Rutherford and her mother? My husband and I had experienced so many dead ends in our search for my great-grandmother, that I tried hard not to get my hopes up.
But, I really wanted to hear that story.
I laid down my doubts and invited them over.
Sandy and her mother showed up that very afternoon.
I had a creative writing teacher once—Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler—who chastised us if we defended “truth” in our writing by saying, “but that’s what really happened.”
“Truth,” he said, “is often more absurd than fiction. No one will believe it. Your job as a writer is not to tell the truth. Your job is to create believable fiction.”
The harrowing story Sandy and her mother told made me understand the truth of his statement.
