When a stranger approaches your farm stand claiming to be your long lost half sibling on a road trip to track down the father who abandoned you 20 years ago, is the only logical thing to jump in his car and join him?
That’s what Madeline “Mad” decides to do, although there is much more deliberation before she reaches her decision.
As crazy as it is to realize she has a half sibling she never knew about, that’s just the beginning. Because there are at least two more half siblings their dad had after he left Mad and her mom.
Of course Mad misses her dad, but she’s also super pissed at him for leaving them, so trying to track him down has never occurred to her. As far as she’s concerned, if he didn’t care enough to even say goodbye, they’re better off without him.
Reuben “Rube” thought the same until his mom died and he got a phone call from his dad. Not because Rube’s mom had died, but because he had called to check in on her every so often. Rube got to break the news to him that his mom was dead.
Rube isn’t sure whether this is better or worse than leaving without a word. It certainly hurts that his dad called to talk to his mom but apparently never asked to talk to him.
At that point, he hired a private detective to track down his dad. This is in the early 2000s when cell phones are still new and Facebook is still limited to college students, so tracking people down is harder than it would be today.
Turns out Charles Hill started out in Boston, then worked his way across the country, stopping to start a family in Tennessee, then Texas, before finally ending up in California.
He never completely changed his name, but would go by Charles or Charlie or Chuck depending on where he was.
And he was only married to Rube’s mom. He always had an excuse for not marrying anyone else, and, no the excuse was never “I’m already married.” He never told any of his “wives” about his past lives. He just happened to end up with women who didn’t care whether their union was official or not.
Charles also had a completely different career in each life, each of which had a profound impact on his kids.
In Boston, he was a writer, though not very successful. Rube is now a successful mystery writer.
In Tennessee he was an organic farmer. Now Mad and her mom are successful organic farmers.
In Texas he was a basketball coach, having invented a history of having played basketball on a college team at a school where he was never enrolled. Now his third child is the star of her college basketball team with dreams of going pro.
The one constant is that he was always making home videos. Sure enough, his third child is always carrying his camera around and is determined to become “an independent film maker.”
It would be easier to understand Charles abandoning one family after another if he had been a bad father, but he was actually a good and loving father when he was around, making his disappearance all the more difficult for his children to reconcile with the man they grew up.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the ending, just that they do find their father and confront him, and it’s not as satisfying as any of them would like it to be. He’s not exactly repentant, but he’s not defensive or dismissive either.
So, while it wasn’t satisfying, it did strike me as realistic.
The one silver lining is that all the half siblings found each other and they agree that they’re family now.
Having experienced a rift with one of my siblings fairly recently, I no longer see family as something that means anything. It surprised me that these people did after they had all experienced their father leaving them. I would assume such an experience would create an impression that family doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll always be in each other’s lives, especially since the one parent they all share is the one who could never stick around. Maybe they were all more influenced by their mothers in that regard.