WHO AM I?

“What’s your name,” Coraline asked the cat.
“Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?”
“Cats don’t have names,” it said.
“No?” said Coraline.
“No,” said the cat. “Now you people have names. That’s because
you don’t know who you are. We know who we are,
so we don’t need names.”

—Neil Gaiman, novelist, graphic novelist, screenwriter

The winter-brown cemetery grass crinkled underfoot as Katie walked to the grave. The sun made it look warm, but it was icy cold, for Georgia anyhow. Her father's composure seemed real enough, but he was hard to read. His mother's death was sudden, so Katie was watchful for signs that he needed help or comfort. Not that she would know what to do if anything happened. Her father was a mystery to her in so many ways.

The aunts and uncles moved slowly toward the graveside. Of the five, the youngest was eighty-four, the oldest ninety-two—her daddy’s aunts and their husbands, old people here to bury their sister, the youngest, most beautiful of the six.

And then the man walked up, reached out his hand to her father and said, “Hi, you won't remember me; my name is Leon Carter. I was renting a room from your parents when they adopted you.”

No one knows what else the man said. The earth shuddered, went still, and then the aunts and uncles surrounded her father, reassuring him.

Katie stood beside them, not with them. Her father had not known. How could that be? A man in his fifties, and he did not know he was adopted? So his daughter didn’t know either, and now they did. What did this mean for their lives?

These four paragraphs represent the entirety of the novel I meant to write about my paternal grandmother’s journey. The facts are true, except there is no Katie. I am she, and the man is my father. I was thirty-three years old, married with children, and my father was fifty-eight when we learned we were not who we thought we were.

When we left the cemetery the day of my grandmother’s funeral, we went back to my great-aunt’s house. My dad and his aunts and uncles went into a room and stayed for hours; I was not included. When Dad and I left later in the day to make the four-hour drive back to his house, he had little to say. I wanted to know what he had learned, but in my family, you didn’t ask questions. He only said they told him he had been adopted shortly before his father was killed and that his mother meant to tell him one day but never found the right time. “I remember thinking or hearing that I was adopted when I was a little boy, but Mother told me I wasn’t, and I believed her,” was all he told me that day.

My father’s father died when Dad was two years old. A law enforcement officer, he was shot outside the main bank in Columbus, Georgia, around noon on a weekday. Bullets entered his body from five different directions, the first shot disabling his right hand. He was known to be an excellent marksman. There were allegations at the time of corrupt