The Oilman's Daughter by Evan Ratliff

One
    In the summer of 1972, when Judith Adams
was 16 years old, a strange woman knocked on the front door of the
shotgun house where she lived with her mother, on the south side
of Baxter Springs, Kansas. Judith opened it. The woman was small
and thin, a brunette, and Judith detected an angry edge, as if she
were in a hurry to get somewhere and the teenager now in front of
her was standing in her way. She demanded to see Judith’s mother.
“Mom!” Judith shouted back to the kitchen. “There is someone here
who wants to speak with you.”
    Sue Adams stepped past Judith onto the front porch, pulling the
door closed behind her. It was a small deck, just wide enough to
set out a couple of chairs when the weather was nice, looking out
over a flat little front yard with a maple tree and a driveway that
ran up the side. Judith heard the women raise their voices and
tried to peek through the little window in the door. Her mother
glanced back at her, then reached her hand up to block the glass.
Moving to the living-room window, Judith saw three men at the end
of the driveway, next to an old black pickup truck. What stuck with
her most, remembering the moment decades later, was the way the men
stood with their backs to the house.
    After a few minutes, the strange woman stormed back to the
truck. She and the three men climbed in and drove away. “What was
that?” Judith asked when her mother came back inside.
    “It was nothing,” was all her mother would say. A few days
later, however, she sat Judith down for a talk. “If a lady ever
pulls up in a car and tells you to get in with her,” she told her,
“don’t go with her.”
    “Why?” Judith asked.
    “That woman that came the other day said she was your mother,”
Sue Adams said.
    “Was she?”
    “No.”

----

    Judith had known for most of her life
that she had been adopted. Sue and George Adams had thought she
should hear the truth as soon as she was old enough to understand
it. But they’d never said who her birth parents were, and Judith
never asked. Her early childhood had been hard; she was born with
scoliosis, forced to wear a Milwaukee brace to straighten out her
spine. Sue and George had helped her through it, been the only
parents she felt she needed, even after they divorced when she was
13 and she and her younger sister had stayed with her mother.
    Judith’s friends always laughed about how Sue could be
overprotective to the point of paranoia—how she kept Dobermans in
the yard and guns in the house, and waited for Judith in the
parking lot when she attended school dances and went roller
skating. Sue had a thing about strange cars, always telling Judith
and her friends to watch out for them. Her sister was also adopted,
but it was Judith whom Sue seemed to worry about the most.

----

    In 1989, Sue Adams was terminally ill
with heart disease. Judith was 33 then and working at a collection
agency in Joplin, Missouri, just across the state line. She got a
call from her father, George. “I need to talk to you about
something,” he said.
    When Judith arrived at his house, her adoptive father told her
that he’d just heard from a woman named Ethel Louise Williams.
Williams, he told Judith, was her birth mother. “I didn’t want to
hold this back from you,” he said. “I want you to make your own
decisions. I’ll give you this number and stand behind you whatever
you do.” Five days later, Sue Adams died.
    The timing of Judith’s biological mother’s appearance was
unfortunate, even cruel. Judith couldn’t imagine what the woman
wanted with her now, three decades after she’d given her up and
just days before her adoptive mother’s death. But after a couple of
days, curiosity got the better of her. She called up Williams and
agreed to meet at the home Williams shared with her husband in
Baxter Springs, just a few blocks from the house where Judith had
lived as a child.
    She drove over from Joplin the following afternoon. When she
knocked on