The Inheritance Paradox
Twelve (My Story)
THE WEEK WAS FULL of graduation preparations. In the midst of that, both Megan and I had to work. Megan could work remotely and spent her off-time sorting through the things Dad and I had put in her room when we emptied the attic. I bet she would be discarding a lot of them. I, on the other hand, had to go to the office.
Brenda coordinated the graduation party plans. Graduation was Friday evening and we all planned to be there. Of course, the grads all wanted to have their own post-ceremony party, and several parents had gone together to provide a place and safe transportation for them without actually watching over them. We weren’t providing any alcohol, but we were all realistic enough to know that booze and weed would be around for anyone who wanted it. We’d simply be sitting up all night in case there was an emergency and we got a call.
Saturday, however, was a kind of floating open house. This was for parents and friends to congratulate the grads. Our kids had agreed to a two-hour slot for visits and gift-giving.
“You know, it’s more serious than we thought,” Brenda said one evening when we were getting ready for bed. I spit toothpaste into the sink.
“What’s more serious?” I asked, concerned.
“Zach and Val,” Brenda continued. “They’ve asked if they can have a joint reception rather than one at each of our houses.”
“Isn’t it kind of late to get that changed up?”
“Not really. It’s not like we were going to do a lot of decorating and have a hundred people over. There’s our family, of course. I think we only invited four people from your office who we’ve been close enough that Zach actually knows who they are. Loren and Theresa Aisley, of course. They’ve been close to the family since your high school days, and I know Zach has been talking to Loren about the Corvair. Mom’s sister already sent her regrets. I knew it would be too much for her to travel from Washington. There’s maybe half a dozen neighbors, but I doubt most will come.”
“So, what’s the plan, then?”
“Four until six on Saturday at the Johnsons’ house. Val and Zach will both be there and greet the guests from both sides. I’ve sent email to everyone we invited. Mom and I are helping prepare food and decorations,” Brenda said.
“That is more serious than we thought. You don’t think Zach will give up his acceptance at the automotive school and move to California with her, do you?” I asked as we slipped into bed.
“I don’t think it’s quite that far along yet, but I guess Val and Zach have been hanging out with each other most of this year. Just as part of the same kind of group. We’ve never been concerned about that because all those kids are stellar students and started hanging out on occasion as soon as they got to high school,” Brenda said. “It wouldn’t surprise me a lot if a move was eventually in the cards.”
“How could I miss anything so important in my son’s life?”
“You didn’t. It just wasn’t as pronounced as you expected. You were out in the garage with the two of them last night. You’ve known they were a couple. You just didn’t let the idea take root in your mind.”
Mom, Dad, Megan, Brenda, Lisa, and I sat in the auditorium Friday night as the graduates were recognized. Val was, indeed, the valedictorian. Zach’s grades weren’t as high, but he was an honor student. When the diplomas were presented, several students were also presented with additional graduate honors cords.
They didn’t have these things when I graduated. It’s a braided rope that is hung around the grad’s shoulders. Most of the kids had at least one cord, indicating their participation in a number of semesters of sports or service organizations and such. These had already been presented, and they wore them into the auditorium. When they were given their diploma, several students were also presented with honor cords, and significant achievement cords. Some looked like they were weighted down with the number of cords that hung around their necks.
After all the diplomas had been awarded and we delivered a standing ovation, the principal called for quiet.
“Before we dismiss this gathering,” he said, “we have one award I don’t believe the school has ever presented before. I’m holding two gold and black braided cords. I would like to call Val Johnson and Zach Holbrook back to the stage for this special presentation.”
We were all looking at each other wondering why my son and his girlfriend were being presented with an award. The two kids didn’t look like they were expecting anything either as they made their way to the principal. He continued the presentation to them.
“We’re aware that awards can be frivolous and seem to be meaningless. This is not an academic honor—both of these students have received enough of those. But we researched this carefully and this particular honor has never been achieved in our school district. It is for perfect attendance.”
There was laughter in the audience because it did seem like a frivolous award. It was almost an embarrassment.
“I’m not talking about perfect attendance as seniors, nor through their time at this high school. What sets this apart is that these two students have had perfect attendance through their entire twelve years in public school. I don’t know how you two achieved it, but I’m happy to present these gold and black cords in recognition of this accomplishment.”
That was kind of cool, I guessed. I tried to think back and couldn’t remember either Zach or Lisa ever being sick enough to stay home from school, except the one time Lisa broke her arm and stayed out of school a day because it hurt. I guessed she wouldn’t be getting one of these awards.
I think I could have had perfect attendance; except I didn’t treat school seriously enough to maintain attendance when there was something else interesting going on. I didn’t know about Megan. She’d completed her schooling in ten years instead of twelve. She was a PhD in genetic biology at twenty-two and an MD at twenty-three. She never went into residency because she went straight to a research institute. I glanced over at her. She looked deep in thought.
The party on Saturday was at four, but Brenda, Mom, Lisa, and Megan were all over at the Johnsons’ by three to help with the last-minute preparations. Dad and I got there about a quarter till four so we could greet guests. There were already gifts on two tables, one for Zach and one for Val.
Val came from a bigger family. She was the oldest of four with two brothers and a baby sister, all two years apart. I knew Lisa had once gone out with Del, the oldest of the brothers, but I didn’t think there had been a second date. Typical father, I paid more attention to who my daughter dated than who my son dated.
“So, does good health and perfect attendance run through all your family?” I asked Don. We didn’t quite live in the same neighborhood, but the kids had been in the same school district pretty much all their lives, so most of us parents were acquainted.
“Not me,” Don answered. “I was a sickly kid. Then, soon after Betts was born, I was diagnosed with cancer. I’m in remission now, but it was touch and go for a while.”
“I faced cancer when I was about that age,” Dad said. “I was told it was terminal, but it only ended up aging me an extra ten or twelve years. I suppose that means it probably contributed to my terminus, whenever it arrives.”
“Thankfully, the kids all take after Ruby more than me. They’ve all been pretty healthy,” Don said. “You, Nathaniel?”
“Yeah. I’ve always been pretty healthy. Brenda had COVID, but we were fortunate none of the rest of us came down with it,” I said. I really needed to talk to Megan about this stuff.
Later, I discovered she’d talked the entire Johnson family into contributing DNA samples.
In fact, Megan and I had a lot of opportunity to talk on Wednesday. She convinced me that we needed to do some primary research about Dad’s childhood. Having discovered through our grandfather’s obituary that Dad had been a minister just lit a fire under us to find out more. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to tell us anything other than his time travel adventures.
I picked her up at eight-thirty in the morning; just telling all the family I was going to spend a day with my sister while I had her in town. She’d be going back to North Carolina on Sunday. As soon as we were moving, we pulled into Starbucks to get fuel for the road trip. It was only eighty miles to Battle Creek, but we weren’t rushing things. She had her hot little computer open in the car all the way there.
“So, did you get any information on the Johnsons?” I asked. “I talked to Don about family health. He had a pretty severe brush with cancer about twelve years ago.”
“In fact, I got them to agree to all doing a DNA test. I sent it to the lab on Monday.”
“How’d you even get test kits over the weekend?” I asked.
“I have connections at the lab. I called after commencement Friday night and it was delivered while we were at the open house Saturday afternoon. I went over on Sunday and collected the samples. Of course, I already had Val’s. I’m wondering what leads to such good health in our families. It has to be the qRNA messenger I found.”
“qRNA?” I asked. I’d been exposed to a lot of terms from her work over the years, but that was a new one to me.
“It’s a working name. Might not stick. I actually term it a Gestalt RNA, but gRNA is already taken for Guide RNA. It’s the stuff I’ve been working on for the past three years,” she said.
I knew people studied tiny things for long periods of time. My sister was one of them.
“What does this qRNA do?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, silly. I know it’s there, but it’s so rare that I haven’t got many samples. I found it in my own DNA. That’s why I wanted samples from the rest of the family. I’ve had all of the samples analyzed for that single attribute and we all have it, except Brenda. Mom, Dad, you, me, Lisa, and Zach.”
“Val?”
“Until this weekend, I didn’t consider her sample to be a high priority in testing. Now, I’m waiting for the results from the whole family.”
“Where do we go from here, navigator?” I asked as we pulled into Battle Creek.
“Let’s start at the cemetery,” she suggested.
We went in and found the burial record for the location of our grandfather’s plot.
“There’s a double marker!” I said. “I was under the impression that Grandma didn’t want to leave Florida, even for burial.”
“It has the right dates for both Wallace and Louise, but the office didn’t have a listing for Louise as being buried here. I wonder if someone—maybe one of our aunts or uncle—had the stone engraved, even though she’s buried somewhere in Florida.”
“That book you sent me said that wasn’t uncommon. Usually, it’s for unrecovered bodies. The name and date are on a memorial, but there’s nothing in the grave,” I said.
“Well, the address for the family home was also in the obituary,” she said. “Let’s take a look at it.”
I drove to a neat two-story house on Chestnut. It could use a fresh coat of yellow paint, but the yard was neatly kept and the wrap-around porch looked inviting. We snapped some pictures. Since Grandpa died in 1976 and Dad was born in 1949, it was possible this wasn’t the house Dad was raised in, but it seemed likely enough.
We had lunch at a café overlooking the river after we’d driven by the high school. The school was only about five blocks from the family home, so if Dad was raised there, he probably went to that school. We took pictures of that, too. It looked empty, but school was out for the summer.
“What’s next?” Megan asked.
“Well, we’re practically next door to the library. Why don’t we stop there and see what we can find. Maybe they have birth announcements from 1949. Or maybe even yearbooks from the high school!” I said.
“I’m game.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t have paper copies of the yearbooks here. The high school library has them, going back for years and years. 1968? Almost sixty years ago,” the librarian said. We’d stopped to ask for assistance, and she’d led us over to computer terminals as she talked to us. She was very friendly and helpful. “Of course, the high school is on break for another week before summer session begins. Did you know you can access the yearbooks online?”
“We can?” I asked. “I thought you had to be an actual member of the and had to pay some heavy membership fee class in order to get access.”
“Oh, you don’t need to actually belong to the class. I can tell you’re younger than that,” she said.
“We’re looking for information about our father for our genealogical files,” Megan said. “We’re pretty sure he went to school here. His father passed away in 1976 and is buried in the cemetery. We drove past the family home.”
“Oh, I love it when people are researching their families,” the librarian said. “Here we are. If you were accessing the library’s collection of yearbooks remotely, you’d need to pay a fee or have a library card. But in person, we can set you up right here at a library computer and you can access our complete collection.”
She quickly logged into the yearbook site on two terminals so Megan and I could both look through the material at once. It was amazing. In about two minutes we were both looking at Dad’s senior yearbook.
Who knew? I remembered using the library when I was a kid, but once we had the internet and computers, I never thought about how helpful librarians could be. Soon, Megan and I were immersed in the life and times of Battle Creek, Michigan in 1968.
Dad’s senior photo in the yearbook showed a short-haired and clean-cut kid of eighteen or so. Megan switched to the previous yearbook, and we both snapped pictures on our phones of any page that showed or mentioned him. They were only cell phone photos of a computer screen of a printed page that had been scanned, but the quality wasn’t too bad.
I found a picture of Dad dressed in a sport coat and tie, delivering a speech in class. I wondered what the topic was. There was a picture of a Christmas play that said he’d written it and listed the names of the characters. There was a picture of him with a girl at Halloween. They were wearing unicorn horns and horse hoof gloves. The caption beneath the photo just said, “Unicorns Forever.” Weird. It showed they had a sense of humor, I guessed.
“Hey, did you see any pictures of this girl, Rachel Erickson? It looks like she was Dad’s girlfriend,” I said.
“Yeah. Here’s her junior photo. She’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
“Definitely. She looks almost familiar. Do you think she was friends with Dad after we were born? I just think I’ve seen her before.”
“Maybe there’s someone in Zach’s or Lisa’s class who looks like her,” Megan suggested. “Now that you’ve pointed her out, though, she’s often in pictures near Dad. In that book, too?”
“Yes,” I said. “In a choral group, standing next to each other. Cheering at a basketball game. Planning a class event. She was in this Christmas play Dad wrote. And there they are in this picture of the senior prom. They were definitely an item.”
“Not so many pictures in this yearbook, but you know the books focus mostly on the seniors and they were juniors in this one. But they’re still there.”
She opened the previous year’s book and quickly scanned through, seeing only a single photo of Dad other than the class photo. Rachel was in the class photo, too, but they didn’t seem to have any connection.
I went to the senior photos in the ’68 yearbook. Beneath each photo was a list of accomplishments and memberships. Dad played baseball three years. He was on the school newspaper staff. He participated in speech club four years. And then the gem: Accepted at Grace Bible College.
We looked at Rachel’s senior photo and found a couple of the same activities, but no college acceptance. I wondered if she planned to follow Dad to Grace. Rachel was also in the art show and the art club. She was mentioned as showing jewelry she’d made in a competition and that she had won.
By three o’clock, we were pretty well wrung out and overwhelmed by the amount we’d learned about our father. There was no way we were going to drive all the way to Grand Rapids where Grace Bible College and Seminary were.
We stopped at the coffee shop we’d seen coming into town and headed back to Ann Arbor. We’d been promised the family favorite chicken and dumplings for dinner.
“Oh! Something smells so good!” I said as Megan and I entered the house.
“I’d recognize that smell anytime and anywhere,” Megan said. “Mom is making chicken and dumplings!”
“Almost right,” Mom said, coming from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. “This batch was entirely made by Lisa. All I did was tell her how my grandmother made it.”
“Have you been over here all day?” I asked, giving her a hug. When I called Brenda on the way back, she’d said to just come home. Mom and Dad were at our house.
“Oh, no,” Brenda said, giving me a kiss. “We worked hard all day over at the house. But everything needed to make chicken and dumplings was packed up and over here, so we got back about three. Then the cooking lessons began.”
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“In the living room watching a baseball game,” Mom said.
“I’m right here,” Dad said, coming into the room. “The game was barely enough distraction from the smells to keep me sane.”
Megan and I both gave him a hug. Zach and Val came down the stairs, both looking freshly showered.
“Dad, we sanded and filled rust spots on the Corvair all day! Gramps was out there with us until we decided it was time to clean up. That’s when he turned on the TV. He doesn’t just loaf around,” Zach said.
“My arms are still vibrating from that sander,” Val laughed. “Can I help with anything, Lisa?”
“It’s time to eat,” Lisa called back from the kitchen. “Set the table and sit down.” She carried a big cooker full of the best-smelling dinner on God’s green earth.
We all hustled around, getting everyone seated at the dining room table and helping with the other dishes. Then we fell to eating and talking. Zach and Val were incredibly excited about the car, and I wondered if they’d really spent the entire day in the garage. Val fairly glowed when she looked at him.
“Now you’ll need to weld a good piece of steel to the floorboard under the accelerator,” Dad said. “It’s not a big rust spot there, but you don’t want to risk putting your foot through the floorboard someday.”
“Gramps pulled all the carpet while we were working. The floor looks in surprisingly good shape,” Zach said.
“I had my old Corvair for ten years. Ralph Nader tried to scare us all away from that model, but I never had a problem with it. The rear engine with transverse tranny was way ahead of its time. Just remember to check the oil regularly. That was almost the death of mine.”
“When did you get that car, Dad?” I asked. I knew he had the car before he met Mom.
“Oh, must have got it in seventy-two. It was eight years old then and had almost a hundred thousand miles on it. Came from down south somewhere, so it didn’t have much salt damage. Good little car,” Dad said.
“The chicken and dumplings are absolutely wonderful. Well done, Lisa,” Megan said.
“Thanks, Aunt Meg. Grandma taught me all kinds of tricks.”
“The most important part is not to overwork the dough. So many dumplings are served dense and soggy. You want something that puffs up above the liquid and browns on top,” Mom said.
“Oh, look what Mom gave me!” Brenda said, holding a necklace out from her neck.
“It’s just an old family piece my mother passed down. I thought I’d give it to Lisa eventually, so it’s just right that Brenda have it for now,” Mom said.
Dad was suddenly alert and leaning forward to reach for the pendant at Brenda’s neck.
“It’s like a coat of arms and even has a motto on it,” Brenda said.
“Unicorni in aeternum,” Dad whispered without looking. “Where? When?”
I was a little worried. He was panting like he couldn’t catch his breath.
“Oh, it’s been in the family for at least a hundred years,” Mom said. “I don’t think it’s really a coat of arms. I never actually wore it myself. I remember Grandma once said it came from a Lake Michigan Kelpie.”
“Rachel,” Dad gasped. “Sasha!”
His eyes glazed over and he just sat there staring into space.
I knew who Sasha was. I looked at Megan. We also knew who Rachel was.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
