high school. At least that information gave us his age relative to that date, so again I did the math but realized he would have been only eleven years old when I was born. That made him an even less likely paternity suspect than his father.
“What about the widow?” I asked. “Can you find anything at all on Lavonne Bauer? Is she still alive?”
In less than a minute, Zed came up with an address for a Lavonne Bauer near Paradise in Lancaster County. He also tried to find an address for the son, but nothing came up.
“Who are these people?” Zed asked after he printed out Lavonne’s address and handed it to me.
“I’m hoping she’s wrong,” I replied, “but according to Mammi, my biological father’s name is Burke Bauer. At least that’s what I think she was telling me. So either she was talking about a different Burke Bauer altogether, or back when my mother was nineteen she had an affair with a thirty-two-year-old married man who got her pregnant. That’s…shocking.” I stopped, realizing this subject material wasn’t the best for a conversation with a twelve-year-old.
“An older guy with a younger babe?” Zed replied. “That’s not shocking. That’s not even all that unusual, at least not on TV.”
I sighed.
“Seriously,” Zed protested. “I mean, isn’t that one of the signs of a midlife crisis?”
I looked at his earnest face and couldn’t help but laugh.
“What are you watching, Zed? Oprah? The View?” If he was, it was online or at a friend’s house because Marta didn’t have a TV.
He blushed as he replied, “Well, come on. You know. Older man, younger woman, midlife crisis. End of story.”
Though thirty-two wasn’t exactly midlife, Zed had a point. Older man, younger woman, end of story. But was it my story? Had I really been the product of an extramarital affair? If so, I had to wonder how it could have happened, how a young Amish girl and a mature married man could have even met, much less ended up in a clandestine relationship. However it had begun, I couldn’t imagine its progression either, especially regarding the pregnancy. Had Giselle been foolish, perhaps even gotten pregnant on purpose in the hope that Burke would leave his wife for her? Maybe once he learned of Giselle’s pregnancy, he had rejected her, even tried to pay her off and send her on her way. Whatever the details, if I had the correct Burke Bauer, as I suspected I did, somehow I knew there was much more to the story than I would ever be able to learn from a simple Internet search.
At least this new evidence might help answer my most important question, which was why I had been given up for adoption at all. Obviously, a married man who already had a legitimate child of his own wouldn’t have wanted me—or even been willing to acknowledge me. Perhaps Giselle’s heartache was so great from his rejection that she decided that she hadn’t wanted me either. But if that was the case, then surely one of her sisters could have taken me in, or even Mammi herself, and raised me. So why hadn’t they? Before today I couldn’t begin to fathom the answer to that question. But now I realized the truth, that this Amish family may have been turned against me before I was even born because I was conceived through an adulterous relationship. After all, my mother bore a scarlet letter, so to speak.
Perhaps, to their minds, that letter simply extended to me as well.
TWENTY-SIX
I left the cottage immediately. After sitting in my car for a few minutes, I went to a florist shop, picked up a bouquet of red roses, and then drove to the home of Lavonne Bauer. She lived just outside of Paradise, a couple of miles from Susan Eicher’s house, in a modest, one-story colonial with a tidy, well-landscaped yard. I’d decided to pose as a delivery person. I just wanted an excuse to see her—I wasn’t necessarily going to talk to her. But she wasn’t home. On the way back to Marta’s, I threw the roses, all twenty-seven dollars worth, out the window, one by one.
That evening I was shocked when Alexander showed up at Marta’s cottage in a white van. I looked out the front window as he spoke to the driver and then climbed out. According to Mammi, this kind, gentle Amish man was not my father after all, a thought that filled me with a deep sense of