The waitress simply smiled and nodded and slowly backed away from the table.
Then Holly turned back to me and said excitedly, “You’re Ryker!”
I laughed nervously. “I’m Ryker. Why does that matter?”
She shared how my testimony had moved her, how she was also adopted, and that she had felt a connection with me through my story, felt we had a lot in common. She’d hoped to catch up to me—catch up to Ryker—and when she had met me, she held on to the fantasy that I might be him, as unlikely as that was. That was why she didn’t want me to tell her my name; she didn’t want her fantasy spoiled.
Holly has also been chasing fantasies. We do have a lot in common!
We laughed together.
“I am so relieved,” I said. “I was embarrassed to tell you why I was here. I don’t know; I thought you wouldn’t understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I shrugged. “Well, it sounds stupid now, but I thought, you know, because of your background.”
She cocked her head to the side and furrowed her brow. “My background? Wait, who do you think I am?”
“Well, Dr. Raskin told me about you. He said you were a celebrity socialite from California who often did fundraising drives for charities.”
Holly got wide-eyed and covered her gaping mouth with her hand.
“He also said you were married to a politician. But you’re not, right?”
Holly busted out laughing. “That’s Mrs. Freedman! You thought I was Mrs. Freedman!” She was laughing so hard, everyone in the diner turned to stare at us.
I waited a moment to let her laughter settle, then I asked, “Who’s Mrs. Freedman?”
She laughed some more, then gathered herself enough to answer, “A celebrity socialite from California who often does fundraising drives for charities, and who’s also married to a politician.”
“And you’re not Mrs. Freedman.”
She collected herself, wiped the smile from her face, and said, “No. I’m her dentist.”We were still laughing when we left the diner. “What a relief,” I said. “I can be myself. I don’t have to be shy about what I’m doing here.”
“No, you don’t have to be shy about that.”
“And I don’t have to be worried about falling for a married woman.”
“Not unless the waitress from the diner is married,” she said. She stopped cold, turned to me, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “The waitress!”
I looked at her confused.
“She said you look just like a group of people she’s seen before at her diner. Maybe that’s it! Maybe you’re related to them!”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
She turned me around, took my arm in hers, and started walking us back the way we’d come. “We have to go back there. We have to find your family.”11HollyFor a relatively straight path, the Appalachian Trail sure provided its share of twists and turns, and my next stop, Franklin, was no different.
For the past two days, I had been with a man who I had hoped was somebody he actually was. And he had been with me, hoping I wasn’t somebody who I wasn’t. “We should just be ourselves,” I said to him, “and everything will work out.”
He didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know,” he said. “There are some things about me, some unorthodox things.”
“Well, I hope so!” I said enthusiastically. “I’m starting to like you. There’d better be some unorthodox things about you.”
“Starting to like me?” he chided.
I nodded. “Starting, yes. The day’s still young.”
A waitress had mistaken Ryker for someone else, perhaps a relative. It was our first lead; however, she couldn’t really give us any more details about this other person—a group of people, nine, in fact. We left her the number for the motel we were staying at, just in case the group came in again while we were there. She did say that she thought one of the men in the group was a paramedic. She remembered seeing him in what she thought was a paramedic uniform though she could have been mistaken.
Nevertheless, we had a lead!
We had also had a big lunch. I was simultaneously feeling reinvigorated and sleepy.
“I propose we go back to the motel, take a nap, then we go try to find this lookalike paramedic,” I said.
Ryker took my arm in his and smiled. “Great minds think alike.”After four days of hiking by day and sleeping in a tent at night, then arriving in Franklin to a proper meal and a proper shower, I lay down on the most comfortable bed I’d ever lain on in all my life. My aching muscles relaxed to such an extent that it felt like my whole body, but not my mind, was asleep. I was unable to move, nor did I want to.
Ryker was in the shower singing Frank Sinatra—badly. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the comfort of being well-fed and well-tired lying in a warm bed.