Pearls on a String by Jane Merling

Author:Jane Merling [Merling, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BayMar Publishing
Published: 2022-09-20T15:35:43+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Florida

I had been in the house in Florida the previous year when Mom passed away but didn’t remember much about it. We sat in the sunroom, and I noticed how nice everything looked. The weather was great, and the community was in full bloom.

Dad seemed a bit fidgety as he poured drinks for us. We made small talk, but he looked as though he was expecting someone. When a car pulled into the driveway, he jumped up and went to the door.

“Lorna?” She walked into the sunroom and gave me a big hug.

“I’ll fix us drinks,” Dad said picking up our glasses and disappearing into the kitchen.

I started to ask her what was happening, but she motioned me to be quiet. “Let your dad do this his way.”

“I guess you’re surprised to see Lorna here.”

I nodded looking from one to the other.

“She showed up unexpectedly last week and well, basically told me off. She said if I didn’t get over myself, I could lose you kids forever. I wasn’t too happy about being confronted like that at first, but we started talking and I calmed down. One thing led to another, and we ended up talking the whole thing out.”

“Dad, I….”

“Let me finish Sarah. I’m still not thrilled about how this evolved, but I’ve been thinking a lot about your grandmother and her life. There is a lot about what you’ve uncovered that I didn’t know, but let’s start with what I did know.”

“Your mother and I needed birth certificates to obtain a marriage license. I thought it was a simple request to ask your grandmother for my birth certificate, but it caused her a great deal of distress, which I didn’t understand at the time. Days went by, and time was getting short. Our wedding date had been set, and I needed that information. Finally, she told me the short version of her first marriage in New Jersey, how my father had died of the Spanish flu, her marriage to William, and how they came to live in Toronto. But the bigger issue was that William had not adopted me, which created another problem. I had no legal right to the name Langner, so I had to hire a lawyer and get my name changed. All of this had to be done in a great hurry.”

“So, we are really Meyers and not Langners?”

“Legally we are Langners. I thought about Meyer as being my birth name, but it was all so confusing and would have created more problems if I had insisted on using it. But I was angry at both William and your grandmother. I was twenty-six years old and about to be married. I felt I had the right to know about her previous marriage and my background. I didn’t even know I had been born in New Jersey. I assumed that they had emigrated from Germany directly to Canada. Your grandmother told me she had planned to explain all this to me someday, but perhaps she thought it would just never come up.

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