And in the last year before the wedding, Junia did something I knew nothing about until three days before it happened, when she sat me down and told me because she did not want me blindsided at my own daughter’s reception.
She found Roland Frayne.
Not hard — the man’s name is on a building in Bristow Vale. She went to his office in the March, made an appointment under her own name, sat down across the desk from him and said she was Sabina’s daughter.
And Roland Frayne said, “Sabina doesn’t have children.”
He said it politely. He said it the way you correct somebody about a bus timetable.
Fifteen years. He had been married to that woman for thirteen of them. He had two grown children of his own from his first marriage — the new family in her text message — and neither they nor he had ever been told that six girls existed.
Junia said he did not believe her for about four minutes and then he did, all at once, and then he asked her to wait while he went out of the room, and came back after eleven minutes.
She showed him three of the letters. She had brought three, in her purse, and she did not tell him about the other two hundred and eight.
Then she asked him one question, which is the smartest thing anybody in this entire story ever did.
She asked whether he would be at the wedding.
He said he had not been invited.
And my daughter said, “You are now.”
She told me all of it three days before the wedding, at my kitchen table, on a Wednesday night.
I did not take it well for the first ten minutes. I want that on the record because I have been given more credit in this business than I earned.
I said she was inviting a scene into her own wedding. I said she would be the one who had to live with the photographs. I said — and this is the thing I actually regret — that she was doing it for her mother’s benefit, because even a terrible scene is still attention.
Junia let me finish.
Then she said, “Dad, you kept two hundred and eleven letters in an attic so that we wouldn’t have to see a stamp. For fifteen years. You never once let us know what she was.”
