A Chance in the World by Steve Pemberton

Author:Steve Pemberton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2011-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE SIGN OF THE FOUR

I lived in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, sharing a small two-bedroom apartment with a fraternity brother. At seven o’clock that Friday evening, the doorbell rang. I peeked through the blinds to see Russell standing there. With his left hand he lightly thumped a black leather briefcase against his leg.

I showed Russell into the living room, settling into a chair across from him. He accepted my offer of something to drink. Our reflections shimmered in the glass of my old television set. Russell pulled from his briefcase a black-framed eight-by-ten picture. He held it out to me, his hands open and extended like a ring bearer gravely protective of his possession. “Here he is, Steve. This is your father.”

The picture I had seen as a young boy years earlier—the one accompanying the announcement of Kenny’s death at age twenty-six—looked nothing like this one. In Russell’s photograph, Kenny’s hair was dark and had been straightened in the style that many African American men wore in the 1960s. Eagle-wing eyebrows framed deep-set, brown eyes. His nose was straight and lean, his lips gently curved, and there was just the shadow of a mustache and beard on a handsome face that bore no scars. Kenny was crouched in a boxing pose, leaning slightly to his right, his right hand positioned beneath his chin, his left a bit lower, poised to throw a jab. Veins bulged from his large forearms. He was bare-chested, and his lean, sculpted physique resembled a coiled spring. His face was as serene as a slow-moving river, giving no hint to the rage that seems to flow within boxers.

I looked away for a moment and thought back to my stolen dash to the New Bedford library as a young boy. For years, I had believed that childhood quest to find my father had failed. So my search had continued. For many days after my library search, I had stared in the mirror, trying to determine who I resembled. Now, nearly more than a decade after that boyhood quest, I realized I had actually solved the mystery of my father’s identity that summer morning in 1978. There were physical differences—my skin and hair were lighter, and our eyes were a different color—yet I was, in essence, looking at a darker version of myself at the same age. The search was over: Kenny Pemberton was my father.

The failure to find Kenny had been a blessing because it kept alive the possibility that my father would return one day. Perhaps some higher power had decided that knowing what had really happened to him was too much for a young boy. But now the truth, lying before me in an eight-by-ten picture frame, brought a harsh reality: Kenny was not here and never would be. The full weight of his absence overcame me as I mentally ticked off the things I

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