When I was eight, Mom and Daddy came and got me out of bed one night to tell me that Daddy wasn’t really my Daddy and that my Real Daddy was coming to visit that weekend.

To this day I don’t know the whole story nor will I as Mom died in November, 2016 and took the secrets with her.

For a period of time, maybe months?, I can’t remember, my Real Daddy and his new wife and their kids would show up in the driveway for a visit. They weren’t welcome in the house so I’d go out and sit in the car with them. My Real Daddy would try and coax me to come to their house where there was “a closet full of presents” for me. I never went.

I seem to remember coming back in the house after these visits, carrying some cool, new toy (the kind that Jason, my now-stepfather, could never afford) and being frozen out by the grownups and side-eyed by my two little sisters.

How many visits? No idea anymore.

Jamestown Street, Randolph, NY — Doug Kerr

But in the early summer of 1967 my parents sold the house on Weeden Road, Daddy quit his job at Putnam’s Garage in Randolph, NY, and we moved to Ohio.

The official story was that my Real Daddy was going to “steal” me.

I was nine years old; what did I know? The grownups said that man was going to come and steal me if we didn’t sell everything and move away so it must be true. Right? I was an anxious little old lady of a kid to begin with and now I really hid in books and daydreams. Reading became my refuge and, later, writing.

Just about every family secret ever to poke its bony little face into the daylight has to do with someone having sex with the “wrong” person. In fact, when you think about it, nearly every secret people keep has to do with sex. Someone did it with someone else’s someone. Someone put their hands on someone’s kid. Someone had a baby that didn’t look like the right someone.

Our family was no exception to any of the above. Nor was our family unusual. These things happen all the time. To this day.

Decades later a woman from near where Mom grew up in western Pennsylvania tracked me down to tell me that her late father (not my Real Daddy, by the way) and my mother had had an affair and I was the result. She told me that Mom used to send her father my school pictures every year. Mom denied that there had been affair, saying he’d had been a “good family friend”…that Jason had never heard of. She admitted that he was such a good friend that, yes, she did send him my school pictures.

So the secrets remain secret.

Even if I could find out who my biological father was (all possible candidates are dead), it no longer matters. Jason Remington was my Daddy. He gave me my bull-headed work ethic and my name.

I told you one of mine. Tell me one of yours.

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