Free Finding Their Son by Debra Salonen Page B

her journal. He’d seen the yellowed clipping. Bobbi had one just like it in their wedding album.
    “A few weeks later I heard you joined the Marines.”
    He nodded. “Seemed like the smart thing to do for a guy with a high school diploma and a kid on the way.” He didn’t try to soften the snarl that came from describing that turning point in his life.
    “I told myself I was happy for you,” she said. “I got something from you—more than I expected as I later found out, but at the time I was satisfied.”
    He wondered if he’d given her any satisfaction that night. She’d implied not, but he hadn’t been a complete novice when it came to pleasing women. He might have asked if the question wouldn’t have come off sounding completely lame and a dozen and a half years too late.
    “When did you find out you were pregnant?” There, he could be a grown-up.
    She looked reflective. “I think I knew within a couple of weeks. Not possible, I’ve been told. But I knew. Deep down. The old bla—” She caught herself from saying something she didn’t want him to hear. Another secret? “A voice in my head told me I was pregnant, but I refused to believe her. It, I mean.”
    He tried to picture Char coping with such a scary reality,alone. Micah’s age. A tenth-grade student with her whole life ahead of her—and a new life inside her. “You must have been scared.”
    She shook her head. “One would think, right? But actually, I was happy. Excited. Delirious. That’s why I kept it a secret for as long as I could. I knew that once everyone else found out—my mother and Pam, in particular—there’d be holy hell to pay. So as long as it was just me and the baby I could be as happy as I wanted to be.”
    As happy as I wanted to be. The words sounded eerily familiar, but Eli couldn’t place them.
    “That’s not the kind of thing you can keep secret forever.”
    “I know. Eventually the school called my mother because I’d been skipping P.E. It wasn’t like I had any choice after a certain point. If I’d showered with the other girls I would have been outed immediately. I got by longer than I expected by stealing my aunt’s prescription pad and writing an excuse of contagious impetigo. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded bad, and nobody seemed in a rush for me to share water or towels with my classmates.”
    “Eventually someone complained?”
    “Miss Duty. Can you believe we had a P.E. teacher named Duty? Only in Pierre.”
    Eli remembered the woman all too well. She’d come on to him—in a broadly flirtatious way—after practice one day. He could have nailed her without a backward glance…if he hadn’t been on-again with Bobbi at the time. “And…”
    “She called my aunt. I always wondered if Miss Duty was secretly gay.” She paused a moment as if to reconsider the possibility. Eli kept his opinion to himself. “Anyway,Aunt Pam went ballistic. She looked at me—really looked at me—and instantly guessed what was going on. It got loud and ugly around my house for about a week, until I finally confessed what happened.”
    “You told them you had unprotected sex with an Indian. I bet that went over well.”
    She looked miffed. “Your ethnicity wasn’t mentioned. In fact, your name didn’t come up until I filled out the birth certificate. Naturally there was some speculation about the baby’s heritage after he came out because he had a full head of glossy black hair.” She paused as if tripping over that specific memory was painful. “But my hair’s pretty dark without the highlights.”
    “So my name is on the kid’s birth certificate.” Not that that proved anything. His name was on E.J.’s, too.
    Char didn’t answer right away. “No,” she finally said.
    “No?”
    “Pam totally went off when she saw your name. She said the last thing any of them needed was for some tribal muck-a-mucks to get involved. She balled up the form and threw it in the garbage. She came back a