I don’t know how I feel, either, about taking their daughter’s name. I don’t know if I can bear the weight of that burden.
“Let’s not pressure her, Hank.” Turning to me, Mrs. Nielsen says, “Take the time you need, and let us know. You have a place in our home, whatever you decide.”
Several days later, in the store stocking shelves in the canned food aisle, I hear a man’s voice I recognize but can’t place. I stack the remaining cans of corn and peas on the shelf in front of me, pick up the empty cardboard box, and stand up slowly, hoping to determine who it is without being seen.
“I got some fine piecework to barter, if you’re amenable,” I hear a man say to Mr. Nielsen, standing behind the counter.
Every day people come into the store with reasons why they can’t pay, asking for credit or offering goods for trade. Every evening, it seems, Mr. Nielsen brings something home from a customer: a dozen eggs, soft Norwegian flatbread called lefse, a long knitted scarf. Mrs. Nielsen rolls her eyes and says, “Mercy,” but she doesn’t complain. I think she’s proud of him—for being kindhearted, and for having the means to be.
“Dorothy?”
I turn around, and with a little shock I realize it’s Mr. Byrne. His auburn hair is lank and unkempt, and his eyes are bloodshot. I wonder if he’s been drinking. What is he doing here, in the general store of a town thirty miles from his own?
“Well, this is a surprise,” he says. “You work here?”
I nod. “The owners—the Nielsens—took me in.”
Despite the February cold, sweat is trickling down Mr. Byrne’s temple. He wipes it away with the back of his hand. “So you happy with them?”
“Yes, sir.” I wonder why he’s acting so odd. “How’s Mrs. Byrne?” I ask, trying to steer the conversation to pleasantries.
He blinks several times. “You haven’t heard.”
“Pardon?”
Shaking his head, he says, “She was not a strong woman, Dorothy. Couldn’t take the humiliation. Couldn’t bear to beg for favors. But what should I have done different? I think about it every day.” His face contorts. “When Fanny left, it was the—”
“Fanny left?” I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am.
“A few weeks after you did. Came in one morning and said her daughter up in Park Rapids wanted her to live with them, and she’d decided to go. We’d lost everyone else, you know, and I think Lois just couldn’t bear the thought . . .” He wipes his hand across his whole face, as if trying to erase his features. “Remember the freak storm that blew through last spring? Late April it was. Well, Lois walked out into it and kept walking. They found her froze to death about four miles from the house.”
I want to feel sympathy for Mr. Byrne. I want to feel something. But I cannot. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I suppose I am sorry—for him, for his tattered life. But I cannot muster any sorrow for Mrs. Byrne. I think of her cold eyes and perpetual scowl, her unwillingness to see me as anything more than a pair of hands, fingers holding a needle and thread. I am not glad she is dead, but I am not sorry she is gone.
At dinner that evening I tell the Nielsens I will take their daughter’s name. And in that moment, my old life ends and a new one begins. Though I find it hard to trust that my good fortune will continue, I am under no illusions about what I’ve left behind. So when, after several years, the Nielsens tell me that they want to adopt me, I readily agree. I will become their daughter, though I never can bring myself to call them Mother and Father—our affiliation feels too formal for that. Even so, from now on it is clear that I belong to them; they are responsible for me and will take care of me.
AS TIME PASSES, MY REAL FAMILY BECOMES HARDER AND HARDER to remember. I have no photographs or letters or even books from that former life, only the Irish cross from my gram. And though I rarely take the claddagh off, as I get older I can’t escape the realization that the only remaining piece of my blood family comes from a woman who pushed her only son and his family out to sea in a boat, knowing full well she’d probably never see them again.
Hemingford, Minnesota, 1935–1939
I am fifteen when Mrs. Nielsen finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse.
It’s clear when I walk into the kitchen that I’ve done something to displease her. She is quieter than usual, with an air of injured aggravation. I wonder if I’m imagining it; I try to remember if I said or did anything to upset her before I left for school. The pack of cigarettes, which my friend Judy Smith’s boyfriend bought for her at the Esso station outside of town, and which she passed along to me, doesn’t even register in my mind.