My Son Had Written Me Every Birthday for 25 Years. The Estate Wanted Me to Sign Him Away

Nathan stood when I came over, which surprised me. Up close he was taller than I had pictured. I could not find my mother’s chin in him, or anything of the lawyer’s, either.

“Mrs. Lindqvist,” he said. Then he shook his head. “Greta. I’m sorry. I’ve been practicing that for weeks, and I still don’t know what to call you.”

“Greta will do,” I said, and we both sat.

Harwood stood at the end of our booth, his hat in his hands, and said he only wished to speak. I did not invite him to sit. Nathan did not invite him either.

“He approached me too,” Nathan said, without looking up from his coffee. “Two weeks ago. He offered to help me locate a birth family in exchange for a release of any claims against the estate. I told him I’d already located one.”

So the estate had been buying silence from both of us. Harwood had come to my door with a check and to my son with a promise, and neither of us had been offered the truth.

“The state will subpoena those files whether you sign or not,” Harwood said quietly. “Walter is dead. The estate is trying to protect what remains of his name and the families he dealt with.”

I stood up. My knees ached in the cold. I felt older than I was, and stronger too. “Mr. Harwood, you may leave now. My son and I have business to talk about.”

“Mrs. Lindqvist, this could be handled cleanly.”

“It is clean,” I said. “It was your client who wasn’t.”

Nathan set his cup down. “I think you should go,” he said. “The offer was an insult to her, and to me.”

Harwood looked at both of us for a long moment. Then he put on his hat and walked out, and the cold door closed behind him.

Ellen came over with the pot and filled my cup without asking. “Looks like you two are going to need the pie,” she said.

We talked for two hours. Nathan told me about Paul and Ruth Brekke, good, plain people who had given him a piano he never learned to play well and a love of frogs and stars. He taught biology at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. He had married a nurse named Janelle, who was forty-nine and laughed louder than anyone at their wedding.

I told him about Lyle, who kept every receipt and every promise, who drove city buses and came home every night smelling of diesel and coffee. I told him about the Lakeview Hotel laundry, the steam and the sheets, the fourteen women I supervised in the busiest years. I told him about the summer I was sixteen and how the lake looked that year, flat and silver under the June light.

When we finally stood up, the sun had come out over the water. We walked the shore road in our coats, not saying much, while the waves came in against the rocks in their steady way.

The state’s investigation settled in December. The estate admitted the 1975 payment had been improper and that the adoption paperwork was falsified. The newspaper printed a short notice saying the Pekkala family had been wronged by the lawyers who handled their affairs. I read it at my kitchen table and felt the shame my mother’s family had hung on me for forty years finally lift off my shoulders.

On December 24 I made lefse the way my grandmother had, rolling the dough thin on the board and turning it on the griddle until the edges blistered. Nathan came up the walk at five with Janelle at his side, carrying a pie from Ellen’s café. He said it was not as good as mine. I told him it was close.

We ate at the kitchen table with the windows steamed and snow falling over Piedmont Avenue. Janelle laughed at Nathan’s terrible joke about frogs. Solveig called from Hibbing to say Merry Christmas and, a little shyly, that she was glad I had not taken the money.

After supper Nathan hung his coat on the hook by the door, the way a man does when he means to stay a while. Then he went to the chair by the window, the one Lyle used to sit in to watch the snow, and he laid his coat over the back of it.

I looked at that coat for a long time. Then I said quietly, “That one’s yours now.”