They're Always With You

by Mary Clare Lockman

“Let’s get started, Aunt Florence. There’s no time like the present,” I said.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  “I’ll make some phone calls tomorrow and we can go from there,” my mom said.

  “Thank you, both of you. You don’t how much it means to me.”

  The next day my mom was on the phone all day. She called the hospital and kept getting different numbers to call. I didn’t mind at all because she was so busy that she had forgotten about all the jobs I was supposed to do. I turned on the Beatles in my bedroom and lay on my bed singing away. There was no knock on my door because my mom was just too busy making phone calls.

  She finally found a woman in the volunteer office who said she was almost as old as the hospital. She had been there in the early fifties and she remembered girls giving their babies up for adoption. She told mom one adoption agency and then said, “Oh, maybe it wasn’t that one. Maybe it was this one.” My mom listened for a long time while the woman went back and forth about the names of the agencies. My mom just said, “Mmm hmm,” and “I see.” Finally she said, “Maybe I should have the names of both agencies.”

  She called the first adoption agency who said they wouldn’t give any information from their records. The woman there suggested that Aunt Florence call herself and then make an appointment with the director. My mom said thank you very much to the woman and hung up.

  She then called the second adoption agency and got the same directions but from a different lady. My mom said that that must be the policy of the adoption agencies. She walked around the kitchen, stretched, and said, “Now it’s up to Florence. I can’t do any more.”

  My mom told Aunt Florence what she had found out as soon as she got home. I guess Aunt Florence was one of those people who once she made up her mind there was no stopping her. She made an appointment for the next day in St. Paul at both agencies. She then called her work to say she wouldn’t be in. Aunt Florence asked my mom if she would read the letter she wrote to her son after she finished.

  Gramps wondered if Aunt Florence was okay when she didn’t come upstairs for dinner. My mom said maybe she was tired. After the rest of us finished eating, my mom brought a plate of food downstairs to Aunt Florence. I washed the dishes and had them drying in the dishrack. My mom hadn’t emerged yet from the basement. I was dying to know what they talked about but then I thought I better keep Gramps occupied. I watched a guy named Walter Cronkite, whom Gramps loved, give the world news. I said, “Isn’t there any good news?” but Gramps wasn’t listening to me. I was glad when it was over because I was worn out but then we had to watch the local news. My mom was back in the kitchen by the time the weather was over.

  My mom didn’t say anything about the letter until the next morning. Aunt Florence’s appointment was 9:00 am so she was out the door by 7:30 am. I was still sleeping, believe me. My mom said she told Aunt Florence good luck from me too. She said the letter was so beautiful that she couldn’t imagine Daniel not responding.

  Aunt Florence got home late in the afternoon.

  “How’d it go,” my mom asked.

  “The first agency had no record of Daniel. The woman listened to me and asked me some questions. She looked through their files and didn’t see anything. I told her I also had an appointment at the other agency. The woman said she hoped I had better luck there. So I left and went to the second agency. The woman there said the exact same thing. I hung onto my letter thinking that I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. So here I am.”

  “Florence, I’m sorry,” my mom said. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing. That takes care of it. I may as well throw out this letter.” Aunt Florence took the letter out of her purse and started walking toward the wastebasket. “It’s okay. It really is.”

  “So you’re just going to give up?” I asked. “I can’t believe it.”

  Aunt Florence stopped walking. “What do you mean? There’s nothing else I can do.”

  “Maybe there’s another agency. Are you sure there were only two?”

  My mom had been really quiet. She piped up, “That’s what the woman in the hospital said. She’s the one I got the information from.”

  “Maybe there was a smaller agency that the hospital didn’t use very often or something like that.”

  “I suppose I could call her back again tomorrow. That wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Gemma,” Aunt Florence said. “You’ve done enough. It’s just not going to work out.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” my mom said. “Maybe there’s something that the woman didn’t remember.”

  The next morning my mom got out her paper that had the name of the woman she had talked to and some phone numbers. She sat down with the phone in front of her, looking very serious. I gave the paper a little glance as I walked by. I hoped the lady, the one older than dirt, would talk my mom’s ear off like she had the last time.

  My mom would be on the phone all day. It would be great. I’d be in my room, listening to the Beatles and thanking God, as I had many times during summer vacation, that Mrs. Bosworth was out of my life forever.

  Anyway, the phone rang just as I started walking up the stairs on the way to my room. Evidently the person calling wanted Aunt Florence. My mom got really excited and then she said, “I will tell her that. Thank you so much.”

  “I’m going to the hospital to see Florence,” my mom said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “That was the first agency Florence went to. The woman said that she had found the information on Daniel. She went through every adoption file from 1952 again and it was stuck in the back of one of the other files. She asked if I would give the message to Florence and tell her she’ll be waiting for her call.”

  “Wow.”

  My mom ran out the front door and I started walking up the stairs again. I heard the door open again and my mom yelled to me, “Get ready to wash windows today, Colette. We’ve both been kind of lazy this summer.”

  My hopes for a wonderful day vanished just like someone popped a balloon with a pin. Here one minute, gone the next. Anyway, I couldn’t voice my protests because my mom was already out the door. Maybe by the end of the summer I’d be calling up Mrs. Bosworth to ask her to please save me from my mom’s summer jobs.

  Aunt Florence went back up to St. Paul the next day to meet with the woman from the first agency. She was home by noon.

  “I answered lots of questions and then gave the woman my letter,” Aunt Florence said. “She said the agency would relay the letter to Daniel. Then, she said it was up to him. She said as gently as she could that sometimes there was no response. It just doesn’t work out. I told her I was trying to be prepared for that.”

  “All we can do is wait now,” my mom said.

  “I’m going to keep my fingers crossed,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  The New Garage

  The weeks went by, slowly at first, as we waited for a phone call or letter from Daniel. I stopped checking the mail every hour after three days because I didn’t have time for anything else. Pretty soon, it wasn’t that we forgot, but life goes on as my mom says.

  We worked on the garage all day on Sundays and evenings during the week. I watched Gramps and my dad measure and mark countless times only to measure and mark again. My dad said we had to be sure that everything was in the right place or the garage would be leaning worse than before. Then we would have to start over. They discussed something called codes. I knew we had a building permit but I guess the codes were just as important. Gramps said without them maybe buildings wouldn’t be as strong as they should be. I said, “Couldn’t we just use more nails?”

  My dad had been thrilled that the foundation or slab was “sound and even.” He had walked all around it checking with this thing called a level. It had a little tube in the middle that had liquid in it. If it was perfectly level, then an air bubble fit between two lines.

  So I waited.

 
“Antonio, let’s get started,” my dad said. “I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  Thank God, I thought.

  “I’m ready,” Gramps said. He still wasn’t as strong on his bad side but he could measure, mark, and hold some things up.

  My dad showed me the anchor bolts on the foundation. Something called sill plates were to be anchored onto the foundation with these bolts. My dad got the 2x4’s from the lumber pile for the sill plates.

  “Looks good, John,” Gramps said.

  In no time the sill plates were down. They looked straight to me but my dad used his level every few inches. Every once in a while he pounded on the sills with his hammer. He gave the nod to Gramps who sprang into action.

  Gramps had been hugging his measuring tape. He took his marking pen out of his pocket and walked around the whole garage. The measuring tape came out for a distance and then snapped back when Gramps pushed the button. My dad was busy with his measuring tape too. He lined up what he called studs, the pre-cut vertical boards. Every sixteen inches Gramps put down a mark.

  My dad went to get the two neighbors because he thought it would be much too heavy for Gramps to try to hold up the sides.

  I couldn’t talk about what I wanted to talk about, which was Aunt Florence giving a baby up for adoption. Every day I thought of a new question. How often did they see Aunt Florence when she was in St. Paul? Or didn’t they see her at all? I’m sure between the store and Grandma Rose’s illness, Gramps had all he could handle. I wondered if he wrote to her. I had to ask my mom about it.

  Of course, the thing on my mind now was waiting for the letter. And I couldn’t say anything about that. It hung over me like a cloud.

  My dad and the neighbors were working like their lives depended on it and they didn’t seem to notice Gramps and me after a few minutes. They didn’t even need me for hammering nails. They didn’t need Gramps with his measuring tape because the places where the studs were supposed to go were already marked.

  So Gramps and I had some time for visiting. I asked Gramps why he hadn’t gone back to Italy for the last 25 years.

  “When I first came over, I planned to be here a few years and then go back to Italy. If I had known I was never going to see my parents again, I probably wouldn’t have come to America. As I told you, I didn’t have enough money for a long, long time. Then came the Depression, the Second World War, and both my parents died. I went to Italy after the War but it was just too sad,” Gramps said.

  “My sister Sofia and I swore that we wouldn’t let more than five years go by before we saw each other again. I never wanted to close the store for two weeks so I always thought it would be the next summer or the next summer. After Daniel died, my sister came here.”

  “You still write to her, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I should more often.”

  “I’ve got an idea, Gramps. Why don’t we go to Italy? As a family, I mean.”

  “You’ve got big ideas, don’t you?”

  “I don’t mean this minute. I mean, well, maybe next summer. Next summer, Gramps. You don’t have to worry about the store anymore. I want to meet your sister and her family. I want to see where you were born.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, Gramps. It’ll be wonderful.”

  “Maybe we could go next summer. My sister and her family would love it.”

  “Say no more. Let’s shake on it.” We shook hands as a promise, something that neither one could go back on. I’d be crossing my fingers until next summer if I had to.

  “Wait a minute. What about Chicago? I thought you wanted to go there.”

  “I do but we can go there anytime. Next summer, it’s Italy.”

  My dad signaled he was ready for Gramps and I to pound nails. I pounded in the nails a little bit first for Gramps because he couldn’t hold the nails with his weak side and hammer at the same time. I set up several for him and then I started hammering in my area. Gramps and I hammered nails into the bottom of the walls that lay on top of the sill plates. It was really fun. The corners had three studs each and were tied together. The garage was filled with the banging and clanging of hammers hitting nails. My dad said, “This is a time when you can get really aggressive.” The corners were nailed together and we had the frame of the garage.

  Before we went back to the house, I made Gramps shake my hand again. “You know what the promise is, Gramps.”

  “I remember.”

  My dad bought something called trusses for the roof. They were premade and looked like triangles. He said they were really heavy so the neighbors would be back on the weekend.

  The two neighbors were there bright and early on Saturday morning. My dad had taken the day off from the store since one of the neighbors couldn’t come on Sunday. He actually had to close it for the whole weekend. He said you just had to take the help whenever you could get it.

  Gramps and I found the perfect perch to watch the trusses go up. There was a little hill at the back of the house where we could see everything my dad and the neighbors were doing. We settled right into our two folding chairs.

  “Colette, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “With all the listening to secrets I’ve been doing recently, I should probably be a psychiatrist,” I said.

  “Maybe the family should get a couch for your room and then everybody can take turns.”

  “Do you want to be first?” I asked. Gramps still didn’t know what Aunt Florence had told me in St. Paul so I had to close my mouth just in case something slipped out about the second Daniel.

  My mom brought the two of us cold lemonade. Then I helped her bring some to my dad and the two neighbors. We exclaimed over how quickly the garage was taking shape.

  After the trusses were secured, my dad signaled Gramps and I. “I was just getting comfortable sipping our lemonade, watching the garage go up,” I said to Gramps.

  “Maybe we should take the rest of the day off.” Gramps laughed.

  “We’ve been working way too hard.”

  My dad showed me how to nail the plywood onto the outside walls. He cut the sheets with a saw and then Gramps held the sheets up while I pounded nails. My mom came out to help us too. When Aunt Florence came home from work, she grabbed a hammer too. Aunt Florence and I were the nailers and Gramps and my mom were the holders.

  “Anyone want to break for dinner?” my mom asked.

  “I’m having too much fun,” Aunt Florence said. She took aim at the nailhead with her hammer, gave it a swift whack, grabbed another nail, and did the same. “Voila,” she said.

  “Aunt Florence, what other talents do you have? I asked.

  “You never know.” She sunk another nail.

  My dad wanted to put the plywood over the trusses too but my mom said we needed to eat since it was already 6:30 pm. They talked back and forth until Aunt Florence said, “I’ll go to the A & W for everybody. But let’s finish as much as we can.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. A & W had the greatest root beer in the world and their burgers and fries were great too. “I’m game,” I said. “We’re almost done with the walls. We can finish the roof too.”

  Aunt Florence even climbed the ladder to help my dad on the roof. Gramps yelled, “You’re amazing.”

  It was 8:15 pm before we finished. “Thank you, everybody,” my dad said. “We should do this more often.”

  Aunt Florence asked me if I wanted to help her bring the A & W home. I said, “Sure. I’d love to.”

  My mom decided that since it was still light we should eat outside while admiring our new garage. So that’s what we did. We sat outside in the full bloom of Minnesota summer while we ate hamburgers, french fries, and sipped root beer from the A & W. After each crunch of a french fry and slurp of root beer, someone made a comment about our wonderful new garage. By the time the brilliant reds and pinks of the sunset had faded, the mosquitoes were biting with a vengeance, so we went inside the house.

  Over
the next two weeks, we nailed shingles onto the roof and siding onto the outside walls. I mostly handed the shingles to my dad and he nailed them into place. With the siding, sometimes I got to nail the pieces and so did Gramps. My dad was happy because we had finished before the Fourth of July. It was time for my dad to park his car in the garage. The whole family stood next to the garage to cheer my dad on. Ta - Da! Aunt Florence always parked her car in the front of our house but now she said she’d reserve a space for the winter.

  “Look what we can do when we work together,” my dad exclaimed. ‘I’ll let you all know what my next project is.”

  “I’ll be there, Dad,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  The Reply

  It was almost a month before Aunt Florence got the letter. It had gone to the agency first and then been sent to Aunt Florence. She took it downstairs so she could be alone. When she came up for dinner, she said nothing. I thought that the news must be bad. Maybe her son had said he wasn’t interested. As I watched Aunt Florence, she didn’t seem upset. She ate like she normally did, but almost with a light-heartedness. I thought the news might be good.

  “I have an announcement to make,” Aunt Florence said.

  I crossed my fingers.

  “I got a letter from my son today.”

  “What?” Gramps stopped eating.

  “Yes, Dad, I wrote to my son a month ago. He wants to meet with me.” She leaned forward in her chair.

  “I’m so happy for you, Florence,” my mom said.

  “I can’t believe it.” Gramps said. “I’m speechless.”

  “I can’t believe it either,” Aunt Florence said. “I didn’t know if he would want to meet me.”

  “Can’t we meet him too?” I said. “I’ll be really mad if I don’t meet him. Since it was my idea and all.”

  “What do you mean it was your idea?” Gramps asked. He still had not taken a bite of his food.

  “It was my idea, Gramps. Just what I said.”

  “So you knew about this. And didn’t tell me.” Gramps looked around the table. “You mean everybody knew about this but me?”