This would be easier if I'd gotten a middle initial, but Artie swore she only remembered his first and last name.

Another lie.

I'm holding eighteen useless pages, thinking about the phone bill I've just shot through the roof because Artie sent me on a wild goose chase she knew would turn up nothing.

It's too bad you can't hate certain people without feeling rotten all the time, and it's too bad those people are your children and your parents. So I can't hate Artie because she gave me life.

I just want to know who helped her.

I'm after an answer to the question I've packed around for twenty years, since it became very apparent that I didn't look like my family, not with my wild black hair and weird green tomcat eyes and a schnoz that--well, I blow my nose and people watch for lightning.

Tall and streamlined, my brothers share a blonde, blue eyed, Swedish kind of pretty that drove girls nuts through school, so you'd think I'd have caught on sooner. Maybe I'm slow. I'm also short. Square and built like God was making a boy, then he was making a girl, then he couldn't decide and I wound up in the middle.

I know that doesn't come from Artie. She's always been petite and pulled together and blonde, while Dad reminded me of the host on Captain Kangaroo, right up to the day he died, three days after I started this go nowhere search for Earl Brown. He died and I never told him my feelings for him hadn't changed.

One of many regrets.

I regret that I was thirty before I loved the right man. Tim's dependable and solid, Cadillac durable, and he's stuck with me through this whole mess.

I regret I'm nobody's Mom but we're working on that. We're not to the point where I stand on my head for ten minutes every time I get lucky and I don't take my temperature every morning. But I trashed the diaphragm last year, shred it with kitchen scissors and sent it out with the weekend garbage.

More than anything else, I regret waiting so long to corner Artie about Earl Brown. I should've throttled her the minute she said the name, pinned her against the kitchen wall with my square, dark face thrust right into her pale blonde one, and gotten the whole truth. But I didn't, and I really regret the way it all came out.

It happened on Father's Day. I don't know why it bothered me that year, why seeing my brothers perched beside Dad like superior blonde gods presenting him with an electric screwdriver they'd bought together, set me off. My gift looked stupid then, in its blue foil paper with the purple and silver stick-on bow that had seemed so perfect at the gift wrap counter in J.C. Penny.

It was James Michener's Recessional, and Dad was a huge Michener fan. I felt uninvited, benched on the sidelines, and maybe that's why I blew when Joe, my youngest brother, said, "Ginger, you should've gotten something he can use. Even we knew how to do that much."

"I'd have known what to get if he was really my dad," I said, and just like that it was out, everybody staring at me, the color gone from Artie's face and the boys immobilized by the fireplace. Artie tried to speak, her thin lips rubbing against each other without producing words, but Dad just stared hard at the carpet.

"Who told you?" It hung there like some kind of godawful fizzled firecracker. I should've said something. Anything. But I didn't.

It was like a movie then, someone else getting up from the ratty brown velvet couch, someone else closing the front door without a sound, someone else better behaved in crisis than they'd ever been as a kid. I blew my chance for an answer, left it all hanging and went home.

Dad died three days later, in a rush hour tangle on I-80 caused by an exhausted trucker who didn't know when to pull over and sleep.

I made it through the funeral without saying a word, surrounded by everybody who knew Dad even remotely, enough people to pack the church to standing room only. Reverend Frye gave the eulogy, rambling about what a wonderful man Dad had been, and I couldn't cry because what I remember most out of that whole thing is everyone staring at us, and how much I wished they'd stop.

There ought to be a separate funeral for relatives and friends, with the immediate family left out. Put us in a room filled with Lazy Boy chairs and movie theater buttered popcorn served with icy vodka tonics, because that's comforting, not being stared at. Show us the funeral on video later, when we honestly feel like saying good-bye, but don't throw us in a room with well meaning friends and relatives we can't remember, who crawled out of the woodwork on the off chance there was something left over for Dad to give away. Nobody wants to be ogled when they're hurting.

I was a well behaved fifth wheel at the cemetery, doing my part by standing quietly, glad for the frayed black veiled hat with tiny bows across the front I'd picked up at a bridal shop and dyed in my kitchen sink with two bottles of Rit. Glad I had it to hide behind, that through its tight mesh, the boys and Artie weren't quite so blonde, or quite so pulled together. I stayed quiet until the last mourners wandered from the grave site, leaving me with Artie. The boys had drifted away, helping people back to their cars, whispering last minute directions to our house, advising someone to crank down the heat on the meatballs and don't forget to set out the veggie trays, because even in death we have to entertain, which is another stupid custom, in my book.

We're on opposite sides of the dirt rectangle Dad's being tucked into, shovel after shovel of red dirt slushing in, and it's the first time I've thought about him and not visualized Captain Kangaroo.

I don't comprehend that he's dead, it's shoved into a corner of my brain that doesn't get much light. I'll get to it later, because I have to take things as they come, one thing at a time. I look at Artie real hard and she shoots me a pleading look, her bottom lip jiggling like a Jell-O mold.

"I want to know who," I said, and then said it again because it was so quiet, except for the dirt and the muffled rumble of cars leaving, I wasn't convinced I'd spoken. But I must have because she nodded then, picking her way around the hole and snaking her arm through mine, leaning on me all the way back to our car like she was a hell of a lot older than fifty-three. Of course the boys had the car doors open, ready for her.

I got her to say "Earl Brown" by staying glued to her side through the whole fiasco at the house, a lunatic custom that dictates that when a loved one dies, you must open your home to dozens of people you don't care about, feed them tiny meatballs on toothpicks and let them graze off veggie trays and ask for more coffee when all you really want is to be alone. The whole world has to wave good-bye to the person you lost, right there in your living room, and until they've done that, you can't do anything you want to do. I believe Artie wanted to lock herself in the master bedroom, bury her face in the faded plaid spread I remember her buying at Sears when I was seven. I wanted out too, any place else would have been fine by me.

The boys were mingling, blonde faces empty except for the wetness in their matching blue eyes, when I cornered Artie in the kitchen. She was measuring out decaf, and I planted myself between her and Mr. Coffee and said I wanted to know.

"Ginger, not now--"

"I want to KNOW!"

I was screeching, irreverent, with no respect for the dead who'd just left us or for the living, hungry humans behind the kitchen's swinging oak door. Like I said, I deal with one thing at a time.

"Earl Brown," she said slowly, like a murderer confessing. I had to understand, she continued, wadding a paper filter into a crumpled ball, it was the sixties.

As if I was less illegitimate because I'd been conceived with Janis Joplin warbling in the background, raspily imploring God to buy her a color TV.

Artie and Dad had separated, and she'd taken the boys and gone to a friend in Utah. It was just one time, she said, when she'd taken a job as a waitress in a truck stop. It's crazy, but that was the hardest thing to imagine, little Artie taking orders for Today's Special in a chili stained, frayed pink cotton apron.

It was also depressing and I wanted to comfort her, but all that came was, "thank you", as I slunk out the back door without saying good-bye to the people crowding our house, trying to say the same thing by downing enough meatballs and carrot sticks to demonstrate how much they sincerely, honestly cared.

So for seventy bucks I've got eighteen pages of names. I've called and been hung up on, I don't want to think about the phone bill or the money I maybe wasted by contacting PeopleFinders in the first place.

Now Artie announces, working it into a conversation about the white sale at J.C. Penny's, that maybe it wasn't Earl Brown. Now Artie says Benjamin Hartwell, and gives me a number in Bountiful, Utah for Benjamin's dad, an eighty-four year old man who still scratches out a Christmas card every year.

Every year, and nobody bothered to tell me, "by the way, that's from a man who might be your grandfather," because nobody knew except Artie and Dad, and Artie, as she'd explained, had forgotten Utah, everything a blur or one day following another and her struggling to remember who ordered the short stack and who ordered the chicken fried steak.

Artie returns to work, plucking away at WordPerfect and Excel, everything easier now that she's viewed with a mixture of awe and respect. Bereaved, hard working, and alone.

"You were his own, in his heart," she tells me, but I already know that.

I know from memories, like Dad twisting my hair into tight, symmetrical braids secured with green crepe paper and then braiding Chatty Kathy's hair the same way. Or The Sandman, rubbing imaginary sleep dust into my eyes, then sleeping beside me when the mumps left me bloatedly miserable and afraid. I feel his warm, rough hand on mine just before we came down the aisle and he gave me to Tim without ever really letting me go.

I remember his expressionless, "Who told you?" and know that with some warning he'd have said something different. Those wouldn't have been the last words he ever said to me.

I quit listening to Artie after that because I was too busy staring at a scrap from a Cosmopolitan cover, a glossy yellow triangle with an 801 number I'd scratched on it when Artie rattled it off. I started dialing three, five, maybe eight times. Dialed, let it ring once, and hung up. I'd be an excellent telemarketer, I'm much better than those people calling about magazines that will change my life: "You don't know me, but my name is Ginger Harrold and I don't want anything from you. I have reason to believe we may be related, and--"

And nothing but a dial tone.

I knew what to say, but I just couldn't say it.

I'd like my seventy bucks back, but there's no refund for saying Earl Brown when I meant Benjamin Hartwell, and it probably serves me right for believing in an infomercial. Tim says I might try reading a book when I can't sleep, that there's no sense in watching commentary on somebody's junky invention or rip-off service.

He doesn't tell me what to do with this yellow triangle, doesn't tell me to call and doesn't tell me not to. For Tim, nothing's changed, and he ignores my confused silence after we make love, when he snuggles into my side and whispers, "I wonder if we made it this time?"

I can't think about babies now, I can't track days and wonder if I have a headache because I have a headache or because one of his mighty man sperms made it all the way home. One thing at a time, like I said.

I'm mad as hell right now, if you want to know the truth. Artie should have been straight with me a long time ago. Somebody should tell my brothers and it's going to be me because Artie, like Tim, says what's done is done, and it's time to move on.

Sometimes I think if I call Utah, if Benjamin Hartwell's father puts me in contact with his son, everything will fall into place and be over. It should be that simple, but it's not.

I've come this far, but I can't end it.

What if he has fifteen kids and can't imagine slipping up thirty years ago and leaving one behind? What if he gets mad at his own father for sending cards to Artie all these years because he suspected she left carrying his grandchild? That rift would be my fault.

It's all so damned complicated, and I haven't done a thing about it. That yellow triangle got shoved into the bottom pocket of my DayRunner and I haven't touched it in weeks. I may never, because the more I think about this whole mess, the more I wonder why Artie said Earl Brown in the first place.

Benjamin Hartwell could be just another piece of bad information.

Maybe I got too close, hit a nerve once Artie knew I was calling Earl Browns and that sooner or later, if U.S. West didn't disconnect me, I'd get at the truth, and finally know for sure.

Like Artie knows.

When I see her now, we talk all around the subject. She whispers to Tim about babies, rattling about what a gift I was, a perfect little miracle. I know she's trying to make up, to pretend none of this ever happened.

When they're together, laughing and planning and Tim makes jokes about donating his Jockeys to the Salvation Army because they're 'counterproductive', it comes back, that left out feeling like I'm standing with a foil wrapped Michener book while everyone around me instinctively knows the perfect gift to offer.

Maybe that's why, while Tim sleeps, I pull out the Earl Browns and call one or two. They usually hang up, not understanding how much I need an answer. I've got to cover all the bases, I've got to get it right. I'm polite and to the point but inevitably, it's just me and the dial tone after a few words.

Artie swears I'm wasting my time, but right now I can't afford to believe her.

Maybe I'll believe her later, when I've gotten through all eighteen pages.

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