Leaves Of Hope. Catherine Palmer

had been a mistake.

      Did that make Beth a mistake?

      A brief time in Jan Calhoun’s distant past had been nothing more than a blip in the comfortable straight line of her life. Just a small error that she and John Lowell had rectified with their careful, structured and secure marriage. Running her fingertips across the spines of the royal-blue-and-white yearbooks, Beth reflected on the man who had raised her from birth. Her daddy.

      As much conflict as she now felt about the whole situation, she would never deny that John Lowell had been her true father. The family photo albums proved that. As an infant, she had spat processed carrots right in his face. He had held her tiny fingers when she was taking her first baby steps. He had pushed her on the swing in the backyard and taught her how to bait a fishhook, and he kissed her cheek when she graduated from high school. She had loved her daddy.

      So why bother to look for a picture of a stranger whose DNA she happened to share? A guy who had impregnated his girlfriend and then walked away…a loser who had sowed his wild oats, never imagining a baby girl would grow from a night of furtive wrestling in the back seat of some car…a dead man whose brief life had meant nothing to his daughter…

      Clenching her fists in the anguish of uncertainty, Beth read the dates stamped in gold letters on the volumes of the Alcalde. What was the point of looking for him? But then again…why shouldn’t she? How could it hurt?

      She was reaching for a yearbook when her cell phone went off. Jumping at the unexpected sound in the cavernous library, she jerked the device from her purse and frowned at the caller ID. It was her mother. Beth silenced the phone and let her voice mail answer. No way was Jan Lowell going to butt into this decision.

      Beth had been unable to sleep the night before, alternately furious with her mother, sad at the memory of her father’s recent suffering and death, curious about Thomas Wood. She had tried to piece things together, mentally walking back through the years and wondering if one thing or another had held more significance than she thought. It was a nightmare—only she had been awake through it all.

      As the sun was coming up over the lake, she had packed her bags, thrown them into the rental car and driven back to Tyler. She cruised around town, looking at the Lowell family’s old house, remembering friends and events. She passed her brother’s home and considered knocking on his door to ask him if he knew she was just his half sister.

      But Bill hadn’t been aware of anything, Beth realized. If he had, he would have blabbed years ago. So would Bob. Crazy little brothers. Neither one could resist telling on each other or on Beth. If they had known their sister had a different birth father, they would have told her.

      Waiting for the public library to open that morning, Beth had eaten a doughnut at her family’s favorite restaurant just off the town square. Every Sunday after church, the whole Lowell crew had traipsed in, settled at their regular table and ordered the same meals they always did. Fried chicken for Dad, roast beef and gravy for Mom, pork steak for Bob, ribs for Bill. Good old Southern dishes.

      Beth always ate spaghetti. Italian. She had been ready to taste the world even back then. Like Thomas Wood, who had left Tyler and never come back. Had her parents sensed a difference in her? Had it affected the way they treated her?

      Unwilling to hesitate a moment longer, Beth grabbed an armload of yearbooks and carried them to a table. She sat down and flipped through the index at the back for the most likely year. In moments, she had found him. Thomas Wood.

      And he was a dork! In his senior photo, he wore a wide tie and a too-small, pin-striped jacket, and his hair hung in strange, choppy lengths almost to his shoulders. He wasn’t smiling.

      Beth stared at him, trying to see through the black-and-white photograph into the truth of who Thomas Wood had been. Dark eyes…like hers. Dark hair…like hers. Straight nose…like hers.

      But there was a lot of him that looked nothing like his daughter—a pronounced Adam’s apple, a square jaw and those hands! Beth studied the one hand that the photographer had evidently posed so it showed Thomas’s class ring. Huge fingers stretched across the sleeve of his jacket. Big, rough hands roped with veins. Callused knuckles. Round white nails.

      She lifted her own hand and studied her slender fingers and manicured nails, turning them one way and then another. No, she hadn’t gotten them from him, that was certain. But so many other things…

      Bob and Bill had inherited a mix of their father’s sandy hair and their mother’s auburn curls. They both had freckles and a tendency to go soft in the middle. Their noses tilted up at the ends, like Jan’s. And their ears stuck out a little, like John’s. But big sister Beth had brown eyes and board-straight brown hair and olive skin.

      “Did you find what you were looking for?” The reference desk clerk startled Beth as he pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. “Thomas Wood—well, there he is. Guess you struck oil after all. Get a load of that tie!”

      Beth tried to smile. “Yeah, I found him. Thanks.”

      “It’s possible we would have pictures of him going all the way back to kindergarten. You want me to look?”

      Actually, she wanted the librarian to go away. But Beth pushed the yearbooks in his direction. “Sure. See what you can find.”

      “Thomas Edward Wood.” The young man flipped to the index in the back of a volume of the Alcalde. “Did you come all the way from New York to look him up? Because, in case you didn’t know, we can do research for you and communicate online. We’re glad to do that. Not all libraries have those kinds of reference services, but we do. And it’s free!”

      “Great. I’ll remember that.” While the clerk went to do some more digging, Beth read the inscriptions under her birth father’s senior year photograph. Thomas Wood had not held a class office or worked on the yearbook staff or acted in a play. He hadn’t done much in sports, either. His freshman year, he had played junior varsity football. He had been on the basketball team—first JV and then varsity—all four years. And that was it. His future? The caption said he planned to attend Tyler Junior College and major in agriculture.

      An ag major! He was a hick! Her father was a dork and a hick. A goofball with a tight sport coat and big hands and no more aspirations than to be a farmer.

      Of course, being a farmer wasn’t exactly an easy life. Beth knew many of them couldn’t make a go of it. To take college classes showed Thomas Wood had some gumption. And he had chosen that beautiful antique tea set. Maybe there was something ambitious and romantic in him after all.

      Beth read the quote he had chosen to have placed beneath his photograph. It was from Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book she had never read but had heard was one of the most saccharine pieces of schmaltz of all time.

      “There’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

      Yeah, right. We can be free! Good motto, Thomas Wood. Get your girlfriend pregnant and then abandon her. If you had been a creature of excellence, intelligence and skill, you would have stuck around and done your duty. At least you could have paid child support.

      The fact was…she hated him. There, she had acknowledged the truth. Beth stared at the picture of the teenager in the tight coat and wide tie. He was a dweeb, a dork, and she hated him. Good riddance, loser.

      Shutting the book, she pushed back from the table. The desk clerk glanced up. “I found him for you in these,” he said. He pointed to a stack of yearbooks opened and placed one on top of the other. “Here, I’ll show you.”

      Beth could hardly refuse to look after he’d done all that work. She leaned on her elbows as the young man pointed out his discoveries. “Eleventh grade,” he began, his stubby finger jabbing at the photograph of a skinny-faced, even longer-haired version of Thomas Wood. “Tenth grade, ninth. And then we go to grade school. He went to Douglas Elementary.”

      “You’re very good.”