Truth and Consequences: The Moth Radio Hour

In this hour, stories about truth—family secrets, trap questions, and a confession 60 years in the making. This episode is hosted by Moth Senior Director Jenifer Hixson. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: Brad Ewell learns about his biological father. Gaby Fernandez accidentally divulges a family secret. Harold Cox "borrows" his father's car as a child. Podcast # 961

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:56Speaker 02

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, variations on the question, "Does the truth set you free? Does it?" Coming up, stories of confessions, culpability, and sometimes redemption. And occasionally, the truth shows up when you aren't even searching for it.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  We're gonna start with a story that we first heard at the Moth's pop-up porch, which is a tiny house on wheels that we've carted around various cities in the United States, searching for new tellers and stories. When we parked in Dallas, Texas, Brad Yule showed up to share a story around a bit of information that had shook up his world. We were intrigued. Later, we developed it for a mainstage show at the Moody Performance Hall, where we partnered with AT&T Performing Arts Center. From Texas, here's Brad Yule.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  So it was 2019. I was 48 years old, had been in my career for 25 years, had been married to my wonderful wife for 27 years. We had three great kids who were growing up too fast, and my parents were still alive, lived close by, together and still in our lives. My life changed in March of that year with a text message. My wife and I had done ancestry DNA several years before this, just to kind of find out where we came from, and through that, a woman had reached out to her, trying to figure out how the two of us were related. My wife gave her a ton of answers. All of those got shot down after we sent them back to her, and we were kind of at a dead end until this text message came through. And when this text message came, everything was different because she had an answer herself.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  She said that her sister had a baby boy, born in 1970 in Dallas, on my birthday, and she thought it was me, and that my parents just never told me they adopted me. That sounds like a shock, and it was, initially, and it really turned into kind of blowing it off and thinking, this poor lady is out in left field, and we gotta help her. So we agreed, we're gonna do some research, get her back on the right track, I'll look at my birth certificate, we'll figure some things out, and we'll help her out. In less than 24 hours, all I had was more questions than answers. I suddenly realized that my mom had never talked about being pregnant with me, I had never had the mom guilt trip of, I was in labor for you for this many hours, and this is what you've done, or how you treated me, and I had never seen a picture of her pregnant.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  So I came to the hard conclusion that at 48 years old, I was gonna have to ask my parents if I was adopted. I came up with a brilliant plan, to call my dad's cellphone, because he never answers his cellphone, leave a message, and plan a lunch date where we can get together, talk, and eventually, I'm gonna weave into the conversation, hey, funny story, this lady says I'm adopted, that's not right, right? For the first time in as long as I can remember, instead, he answered the phone. So after a little small talk, I went to, "Hey, let's go have lunch together." And he's like, "Oh yeah, sure. Why?" "Well, nothing important." "I went through all the reasons why you might need to talk to your parents at that age." "Everything was fine." "And the more I deflected, the more he'd come back to, 'I want to meet you for lunch. I just want to know what we're gonna talk about.'"

• 4:58Speaker 03

  "So I finally gave up and realized that I'm gonna ask my 79-year-old dad over the phone if I'm adopted." "And that's when I said, 'Dad, this lady's reached out to us saying that her sister had a boy and it's me and y'all adopted me and didn't tell me. Is that true?'" "And there was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone." "I could hear his fingers drumming on what later I learned was his dashboard. He had run an errand that day and that's why he answered his cellphone." "And after a long pause, I got, 'Yeah, Bradley, you're adopted and we've been trying to figure out how to tell you.'"

• 5:32Speaker 03

  "If that initial 48-year-old secret wasn't a big enough shock, it came with two more." "My birth mother had died 19 years before I ever found out I was adopted. I was never gonna close that part of my story up." "The flip side of that was my biological father is very much alive, but he had been in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana for the last 50 years for murder." "So, that sent me on a mad research dash to find out everything I could about this man, why he was in prison, who he was, anything I could learn about him." "Back in Louisiana in the 70s, they didn't keep a whole lot of court records. Everything I found ended up being through the newspaper. I was able to piece together his crime, his eventual conviction.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  I actually found a picture of the man he killed wrapped in a sheet laying on the side of the road." "While I did all this research, I was really okay with the story. It was a weird story to have, but as long as I didn't personalize it for myself, that was fine. It was just a funny story to tell people." "All that changed when newscaster Lester Holt decided to do a 48-hour special on Angola State Penitentiary. He spent three nights there, recorded everything, met a bunch of people, recorded everywhere in the prison. And when I watched that, everything suddenly became personal. Where I had made my dad a very, or my biological father, a concept in my life, all of a sudden, he was a real person in a real place that I had now seen and I couldn't stop thinking about it."

• 6:58Speaker 03

  "That led to therapy, and therapy led to a pretty quick conclusion of, 'I have to meet my biological father once to put that part of my story to bed, just so I can have it done.'" Going to Angola gave me a lot of time to think about what it was gonna be like to meet him. It's an eight-hour drive out there, and this is probably a good time to tell you all that successful 25-year career I talked about at the first of the story has been as a police officer. So, I already had a vision of who I was gonna meet. I'm not saying everybody in prison and jail is like this, but I am saying the majority of the people I've dealt with are not responsible for anything that happened in their lives. If the world was more fair, they wouldn't be there, and at the end of the day, none of this was their fault.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Before I became a police officer, I worked in the jail. I learned in the jail that I couldn't ask anybody what they had done. I had to say, "What did they say you did?", and then you would tell me why you're in jail, because nobody in jail had done anything. So, this was the man I was expecting to find, just based on my past experience, and after a 48-year cover-up, I was not interested in having somebody else that was just gonna BS me and tell me more stories. Getting to Angola is different than anywhere else I've ever been before. It's a beautiful tree-lined, blacktop road, you're in rural Louisiana, it's not a bad drive. Suddenly, you round a bend of trees, and you find yourself staring at a prison gate that says Louisiana State Penitentiary in a crossbar across the whole road, and you can either turn around and go back where you came from, or you go to prison.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  There's no other place to go. So, I got checked into the prison, ferried back to the camp he was in, and found myself sitting in a visitation room. That visitation room didn't really look like the visitation rooms you see in movies. There wasn't a glass between everybody, it looked more like an old church meeting room. It was white cinder block walls, tan tiles, there was a mural painted on one wall, with these white plastic tables, and the same plastic chairs I sat in in high school. So, I sat down and started wondering if I was gonna recognize him when he came in, because I had seen some pictures of him, but none that were super recent. When he walked in the room, I knew immediately who he was. It just clicked, I looked at him, I was like, "Oh, that's what I look like when I'm 70. Okay, got it, cool."

• 9:13Speaker 03

  I stood up, held onto the table to keep myself standing, and watched as he walked towards me and ran through all the things you do when you meet your father for the first time. Do you hug him? Do you kiss him? Do you shake his hand? Do you just say hello? He didn't know about me until I knew about him. My mom kept my, her pregnancy secret from him, and my parents kept my biological family secret from me. He walked up, we did the dude handshake and hug thing, and both sat down. And he started off our conversation with, "Son, it's good to meet you, and I want to start out by being honest." Well, all the alarm bells went off in my head, because all these years of work, when you say, "I want to be honest with you," that's usually the last thing that's going to happen the rest of the conversation. So all my defenses went up, and I thought,

• 9:58Speaker 03

  "Okay, here we go, let's see what this is." And he said, "I could tell you that I'm in prison because of drugs and alcohol, because I was doing both of those when I committed my crime. But the truth is, I did a horrible thing that I can never take back or fix, and that's why I'm here today." From the moment he said that, I was hooked, because he was suddenly an adult, even though I'm an adult now, being honest with me. And after that, instead of dropping that subject, he continued on about his life prior to prison, and his life in prison, that didn't paint him in a better picture. The more he talked, the more I kept thinking, "Man, you should stop." "I would never know this about you, and that's cool? It's, it's good, you should stop telling things." But he kept going, and he kept going.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  And when he finally got done, we tried to catch up, as you can imagine, a man in his 70s and a man in their 40s, getting to know each other for the first time as father and son. We talked about my life as a kid, his life as a kid and as adult, before he ended up in prison. And weirdly enough, circled all the way back to my job as a cop, and his life of crime before he went to prison, and how cops and criminals had changed from the 60s and 70s to the now 2000s. And we're all very different.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  At the end of the visit, I left and got out to the prison gate, still a little confused because this was my planned one and done visit. I didn't intend to do more than one of these. First person I've called, of course, was my wife. She was excited and probably a little bit nervous because I had told her I'd be in there an hour or two. They let me stay for eight hours. So she picked up the phone, she's like, "How'd it go?" And I was like, "I don't know what to tell you, but I genuinely like this man. I don't know what to do with that." So I drove back, settled into the idea that I'm gonna go visit him again soon. We'll get to know each other more. I didn't know prison, I knew by them, but I didn't know initially prison had email. You can email people in prison.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  So we were emailing, calling, and I was already thinking, okay, it's gonna be another visit pretty soon. Instead, less than a month later, the dad that had raised me my whole life died. Three weeks after my dad died, that little COVID pandemic started, and there was no prison visitation anymore. The upside to COVID was they suddenly instituted video visitation. So instead of just talking to him on the phone and writing emails, I could see him once a week for 10 minutes at a time as we got to know each other, which kept him a real person in my head because I could see him all the time. The more we got to know each other, the more I found myself liking him more and thinking, I couldn't really understand why he was still in prison. I knew he took another man's life.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  I knew what his sentence was, but it didn't seem to be serving anybody any more purpose. He had rehabilitated. I felt like he was nowhere near the man that he was in 1972 when he walked in. And I started wondering about what would be the possibility of ever getting him out. While I was going through that, the Louisiana state legislator was also working on some bills that would help men like him have the eligibility for parole that they had never had before.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  While we were getting to know each other, one of the things that happened was he and I kept talking back and forth. I called him Jim. Jim was his name. That was safe. That still kept him at a little bit distance and that made me feel safe. But then I started realizing I liked him and I was lying to myself. Yes, his name was Jim, but he was also my father. But I couldn't call him dad because I'd had an awesome dad and I wasn't cool with letting anybody else share that title. So we bounced back and forth in conversation. He suggested father one time. That reminded me of Star Wars. I'm like, that's too formal. I'm not doing that. So we settled on pop. And pop and I kept getting to know each other, kept talking, the Louisiana legislator, kept doing what they were doing. And finally, they proposed a bill that would make him ultimately eligible for parole for the first

• 13:48Speaker 03

  time in his life in 50 years. While we were waiting for that bill to become law and finally happen, I COVID visitation restrictions finally lifted and I could go see him. During that visit, we really talked more about what it would be like if he actually got out. We, there was no guarantee. Only thing that he was guaranteed was a parole hearing at some point, but no guarantee of actually getting out. But we were daydreaming. At the end of that visit, he got up to be escorted out of the visitation room and go be searched and taken back to his dorm. And he stopped at the doorway and with his big vandals grin says, "Hey, I love you, son." And I stood there dumb looking like, I didn't know what to say because I'd been thinking I loved him for a while. I didn't know how to tell

• 14:31Speaker 03

  him that. Didn't know if he wanted to hear that from me. And I'm finally a moment like, "I love you too, pop." And just, and then he was gone. So I found myself in November of last year, back in Angola State Penitentiary, sitting in a room with him for his first parole hearing in 50 years. The terrifying part about a parole hearing was it was a unanimous vote to be released. If one person didn't like you out of the three person panel, you were staying in prison for the remainder of your life. The first two votes came pretty quickly. One lady looked like a kindergarten teacher. She was cool with anything anybody said, nodded the whole time. She was thrilled to be there. And as soon as she could vote, it's like, "Oh, no, I think you should have parole." Okay, cool. The second guy had a

• 15:15Speaker 03

  longer speech, but pretty quickly voted for parole. The third person that was the final vote had looked mad during the entire hearing. Frowned, brow furrowed, arms crossed. It was like we had interrupted his kid's birthday party and made him come to a parole hearing and it wasn't cool with him. And he started off on a speech about...

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Punishment, the need for people that commit horrible crimes to be in prison. Why it's important to keep people in prison for an appropriate amount of time. And the more he talked, the more I thought, "Oh, we're screwed. This is done. I thought we had a shot, but it's gonna crush me to watch him not be able to walk out." I should also mention during this hearing, the family of the victim testified against my father's release. That was a gut punch to me, and for my father too, because we got to hear what the effect of his crime had been long-term on a family that he had never known anything about. So, as we watched this last man process all of that, he finally paused in the middle of his speech and said, "But."

• 16:18Speaker 03

  And "but" came with a conversation about redemption, and change, and the good things that can happen to people in prison to make them worthy for a second chance. At the end of the speech, he voted yes for parole. And...

• 16:38Speaker 03

  I jumped up, I hugged my dad, and I popped, and just kept telling him, "It's over. We're done. You're coming home." And after that hearing, I found myself the next day, sitting outside Angola, waiting for him to come out, instead of me going in. When he walked out, it was probably the third-best day in my life, short of marrying my wife and watching my kids be born. There was nothing cooler I'd ever seen. Since that day, we've gotten to get to know each other in a normal way. If any of y'all are old enough, if you're young, Google it when you get home, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, one is the best special effects movie of the year he went to prison. Great movie.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  I got to take him to see Avatar 2. I can't tell you anything that happened in Avatar 2, but I can tell you that watching him was fun. Because it was nothing he had ever seen before on a big screen like that. On top of all that, he gets to support me in some of my fun endeavors, like this one here tonight, because he's here celebrating about six months of release.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  And to that, I just want to say that I'm proud that you're here with me and I love you and I'm glad you're in my life. Thank you all.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  That was Brad Yule. Brad says that Pop lives about 45 minutes away and they see each other regularly. Since retiring from the police force in 2024, Brad is now focused on art and photography, tapping into an artistic side he always felt but rarely acted upon. He's also a board member for an organization that helps people who've had DNA surprises. It's called Right to Know. I called Brad to talk to him about life since the story and how things are going at the nonprofit.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  It is going great. We're, you know, we're always looking to help more and more people, you know, is the longer that consumer DNA tests are out there, the more people that are getting surprises. And that's just the trend that will continue. I don't think you'll ever see a stop in the surprises. So we work constantly for reform on birth certificates so people don't have to try to fight to get their original birth certificate and find out where they came from genetically. And outside of that, we're working hard to provide support for all the people that are having this happen like I did.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  I know that you learned about your origin story really late in life, so I'm sorry you never got to meet your mom. Do you ever wonder about how you would have responded to the news that your father was in prison when you were a younger man?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  You know, I really have. I think, I think that was one of the parts where I was very fortunate in my life. What I've told people and what other people have always said is that people who could be very good criminals are usually the ones that become good cops. And I could say, looking at myself in the mirror and just being honest with myself, had I grown up in a completely different environment than I did, I very likely may have ended up exactly where my father was at some point. I think that could have gone either way for me and it was just who ended up raising me at the time I was raised.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. How about, how about what is Pop up to these days?

• 20:23Speaker 04

  You know, he has been really living his best life. He is back together with the woman that he was married to when he went to prison. But what, what Pop tells me all the time is every day out here is a much better day than any day he had in there. So he's just soaking up every day he can get. You know, when you, when you spend that long, I think, in prison, just going to the grocery store is a pretty cool thing.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  It, it takes very little to be a big deal when most of your life has been so confined.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And it was fifty years he was in there?

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Um, what's something loving you could say to adoptive parents who feel nervous about telling their kids?

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Even though I've built a great relationship with my biological father, my dad will always remain the person that was my dad, and that's the one that raised me. Because that, that was who was in my life. So when you look at it, it's, the, the best way I try to describe it to people is it's no different than grandparents. Nobody looks around and says, oh my gosh, this kid can only like one set of grandparents. Because all of us get two, or most of us do unless, you know, something bad happens. But parents can be the exact same way. If it's viewed much more like a bonus family than a threat to the current family, I think

• 21:51Speaker 04

  everybody works out in a better situation. And it doesn't, it in no way negates what the adoptive raising parents did for, did for that kid. It doesn't negate what my parents did for me. You know, it, it made some complications because they didn't tell me for so long, but it never negated all the things they did for me as their child.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I love how you put that. Beautiful.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  To see a picture of Brad Yule with Pop and some of their artwork, visit themoth.org. You can share these stories or others from The Moth archive and buy tickets to The Moth storytelling events in your area through our website, themoth.org. There are Moth events year round. Find a show near you and come out to tell a story. And you can find us on social media, too. Just search for The Moth. In a moment, as we talk about truths and secrecy, an immigrant teenager fields an anonymous call. That's next on The Moth Radio Hour.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 23:25Speaker 06

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• 26:19Speaker 07

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hixson. We're sharing stories about the impact of truth. Our next story was told in Grand Rapids, where we partner with Michigan Public Radio. Here's Gaby Fernandez Sanchez.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  When I was fifteen, our car got hijacked at gunpoint. It was my parents, my brother and I. We were on our way to a birthday party that my mom had baked and decorated the cake for. We stopped to put gas and two men with guns came at us on either side and took everything, including the car itself. Once the shock wore off, we realized that we were all standing at a gas station and my mom was still holding the cake.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  That was the tipping point for my family and my parents decided it was time to leave Venezuela to escape the dictatorship and the violence under the Chavez regime. So in 2001, we packed our bags and we came to America.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  The immigration process is a complicated process and they don't give papers to just anybody. I know, shocker. Luckily, my mom is an amazing teacher and she was able to get her work visa sponsored by a school in Florida. Now, because my brother and I were minors, we were also protected under her visa. This means the only member of our family that was not protected under this visa umbrella was my father. My father is a photographer and he is originally from Spain. Because Spain and the US are allies, Spaniards can come into the country for three months without a visa. So during that move, we figured we have three months to sort this out.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  We started to figure out his green card process and we were very, very, very fortunate to be able to hire an immigration lawyer, a luxury that very few immigrants in this country can afford. The lawyer said to us that my dad would have to leave the country and come back in to get another stamp on his passport. No big deal. He left for a couple of weeks to Spain. The day that he was supposed to arrive, I came home from school and the phone was ringing. So I ran to pick it up. They asked for my father. Now, we were very used to getting phone calls from his potential photography customers to the house, so I didn't think it was weird. I said, "My father's not home right now, but I'll be more than happy to take a message." And then the person on the other side of the phone said,

• 28:45Speaker 02

  "Does your father take pictures?"

• 28:47Speaker 06

  "For money?" And it was just the way that they phrased the question, right? "Does your father take pictures for money?"

• 28:57Speaker 06

  I decided to ignore the red flag and I said yes. They asked a couple more questions and hung up suddenly. The second they hung up the phone. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  When my mom came home from work, she said that Dad's flight had arrived, but she hadn't heard from him still. So I told her about the phone call. And that's when we really started to freak out.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  The hours passed by and we hadn't heard from him. It was the next day and we finally heard from him. Turns out, he had been detained at Miami International Airport almost overnight and got sent back to Europe the next day. We were not able to communicate with him at all until he got back to Spain. And when we did communicate, he told us that he was in the room where the call was made. And I was on speakerphone.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  Essentially, he heard me say that he was working illegally in the country. He heard me betray him.

• 29:55Speaker 06

  At this point, we're still thinking, "This is just a legal process, you know? Let's call the lawyer." And we quickly found out that immigration laws are not designed to keep families together. The lawyer explained to us that when this happens, the person cannot come back into the country for 10 years. A decade.

• 30:14Speaker 06

  This is when my mom sat me and my brother down and we had one of the most important conversations in our life. What do we do? You see, on one side, we had just moved here. I mean, the ink was barely dry on our visas. I was getting used to a new country, a new language, new friends, new school, and we loved it here. And on the other side, if we left the States, then we would lose our immigration status completely. So talk about an impossible choice, or let's call it a Gabby's choice, right? He can't come in and we can't leave. We decided to stay and try to find ways to reunite. In the meantime, my relationship with my dad was over the phone. This was before the times of FaceTime and WhatsApp.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  My parents' marriage had been through a lot with the move, and the strain of being in different countries was just too much for them, so they ended up getting a long-distance divorce. And then, my 18th birthday crept up. Remember where I said that when we were minors, we were covered under my mom's visa? But the lawyer explained that the second I turned 18, I would become illegal. So here comes the second Gabby's choice. Do I stay or do I go?

• 31:27Speaker 06

  The day before my 18th birthday, I landed in Spain. I reunited with my dad, I reconnected with my grandparents and all my family. I went to theater school to one of the most amazing schools in the country. I had a fantastic time. But you see, when you're an immigrant, it's like you have this curse, right? That no matter where you are in the world, you're always going to miss someone. And I miss my mom. So when I graduated in '08, I came back to America. But this time it was different. I was able to apply for papers, and I became, long story short, an American citizen.

• 32:08Speaker 06

  And of course, I met the love of my life in Miami. And we took a Euro trip to go hang out with dad. He booked a cruise down the Danube River. And that's where he popped the question. It was the perfect proposal, the perfect ring, the perfect man. But then he said something that blew my mind. He said, "Babe, you know, I'm so happy that we were able to celebrate our engagement here, because your dad won't be able to come to our wedding in America."

• 32:37Speaker 06

  At that point, I realized, it's been 17 years. 17 years my dad has missed of our American life. I'm talking graduations, driver licenses, plays, special moments. And I refused to let him miss another one. I can't. Now, I consider myself a feminist. But at that moment, all I wanted was for daddy to walk me down the aisle. So when I got back to Miami, I went straight to work. But see, this time it was different. I was bold. I was empowered. I voted for Hillary.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  So I marched right down to that immigration officer and I said, "American knocking here, I have an inquiry." Uh huh, you know how in the movies when the main character walks in and they give this like all-American speech? And the crowd does a slow clap into a crescendo? And they get everything they ever wanted? It was just like that. Except there wasn't a crowd, nobody clapped. And the agent said, "No, we don't do that here."

• 33:40Speaker 06

  So I asked, "Isn't this the immigration office?" And he said, "Yes, does your father want to migrate here?" I said, "Oh, no, no, no, I'm not falling for that one again, no, no, no, no." "He just wants to be here for my wedding." He said, "Well, we don't deal with visitors." Okay, so one thing led to another and I finally found a lawyer in Spain who specializes in tourist visas for Spaniards. And she said, "The US government is very forgiving."

• 34:10Speaker 06

  If you're European and white, of course.

• 34:14Speaker 06

  She said, "As long as you admit your crime, do your time, you're fine." So she got him an interview at the US Embassy in Madrid. My dad goes there with all of his documents, including my wedding invitation, and they got back to him with a 10-year visa.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  The week before my wedding, Mom took some time off of work to help me with the last details. And the day that I was going to the airport to pick up Dad, she said, "I'm coming with you." I was shocked. Remember, they haven't spoken for 17 years and they went through a tremendously long-distance divorce. I was not expecting that. We're at the airport and his flight comes in and we start to wait. An hour goes by, two, three, four. He had been detained in immigration again.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  But this time around, he was bold. He was empowered. He had a piece of paper in his hand from the US Embassy saying he was allowed to be a tourist in this country for 10 years. So they had no choice but to say, "Welcome to America, sir, enjoy your stay."

• 35:22Speaker 06

  We finally, finally had that airport reunion we were waiting for. And when we saw him come out, we all just ran to him, the four of us, and we just hugged and cried, and hugged and cried. And then my brother and I stood back and we saw my parents hugging and crying. And at that moment, we realized that we were made out of love. And we were finally allowed to love each other at the same time, in the same place. That week, we went to a Marlins game. My dad met all of my American friends and family. He even saw one of my shows. And on July 27, 2019, at 6:00 PM, he walked me down the aisle.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  I tell you, at my wedding, when I was sitting there having dinner with my new husband to the right, I could see my mom, my dad, my brother enjoying the party. And I thought to myself, wow, 17 years later and an ocean apart, what brought us back together was love. Gracias.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  That was Gaby Fernandez Sanchez. She is half Venezuelan, half Spanish, and proudly calls Miami home. Gabby's the founder, director, and producer of Front Yard Theater Collective, and teaches improv in both English and Spanish. Gabby and her husband Danny are both active in the arts community, and she's a beloved host of the Miami Moth Story Slam.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  To see pictures of Gabby's wedding day with her family all together for the first time in 17 years, visit themoth.org, where you can also download the story.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Do you have a story to share with us? Perhaps a truth you let out of the bag by accident? Or a shocking revelation that changed how you saw the world or felt about Uncle Peter? Maybe a family mystery that was only revealed at the reading of the will? Oh, please pitch us that story. You can pitch it right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-M-O-T-H. The best pitches are developed for Moth shows all around the world.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  In a moment, a final story about reckoning with the truth from the son of a Texas preacher, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 38:05Speaker 00

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• 39:03Speaker 01

  With over 600 live events each year, plus the production of our storytelling workshops and The Moth Radio Hour and podcast, it takes a lot to keep The Moth moving. And the other day, I was browsing the Vistaprint site, and I thought, Vistaprint can be an incredible resource for us. We can use Vistaprint to customize banners for our stage backdrop. Walking into an event where your signage matches your merch instantly gives you that polished, established look that we love. Vistaprint gives you so much more than what you paid for, offering top-tier quality that makes your business look like a million bucks without blowing your budget. Plus, with real people and intuitive tools ready to help you nail every design detail, you get complete assurance from start to finish.

• 39:46Speaker 01

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• 40:07Speaker 02

  This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson. We're hearing stories of shining a light in the corners in search of the facts. Our final story was told at the Somerville Theater in Boston, where we partner with public radio station WBUR. Here's Harold Cox.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  I was a creative and imaginative child. I played a clarinet, I played the piano, and I also listened to Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto and pretended like I was playing the piano, two or three times a day. I was also a talker. My mother would tell me, "Harold, sugar baby darling, please just shut up." I wouldn't. My mother was a homemaker, and she was also the woman who made the cookies and other

• 41:11Speaker 05

  stuff, whatever you cook, before I was schooled. She made this for my class, as well as for my brother and sister's classes as well. And my father was a minister. He had lots of advice that he liked to give. He would often say, "I would rather be two hours early than 30 seconds late." I heard this almost every day. And he also said, "If you tell the truth, the truth will set you free." All right, good words to live by. In addition to this, I was, well, truth to be told, I was a dramatic kid.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  And I learned that if you got sick, that there were certain things that you might not need to do. So what I did is I... I learned the fine art of passing out. I used to faint. So that if I didn't want to go to school, I fainted. If I didn't want to take the test, I fainted. If I didn't want to go to church, I fainted. If I didn't want to go outside and play basketball and football, two things that I absolutely hated, I fainted. Fainting was my superpower.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Now, the only other thing I should probably tell you is that I was then, and I probably still am now, an explorer.

• 42:39Speaker 05

  So, one afternoon, I'm 12 years old. I'm home alone, there's nobody else at home. I go in and I get the key to my father's brand-new metallic-blue Buick Lesabre. I go outside into the garage and I look at this car, which I loved. I ran my hand over the sleek design of the car, and then I went and I stood in front of the driver's door. And I just stood there.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  And I said, "It's time."

• 43:19Speaker 05

  I opened the door. I got in the car. I am now in the seat, I am in the driver's seat. And what's more is, I am in the throne. I know exactly what to do here, because I have seen my father do this many times. And I know that I can do everything that he can do. So, I put the key in the ignition, I turned the car on. The car purrs exactly the way that I knew it would. I put the car in gear, I tapped the accelerator. The car began to glide out of the garage into the driveway. I tapped the brake. The car stopped. I can drive.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  I've always known this. I have always known that I knew how to drive. So I started thinking about where are the things that I can go at this moment? I thought, well, my mother's down at the school, I could go down and I could just pick her up. Or I could go to one of my friend's houses and then we could go to another friend's house and we could just tool around the city. Or I know my mother needs these things from the store. I could just go to the store and I could pick them up and she will be so proud of me. And then I remember, you know, I have actually not been given permission to drive the car. And it would be a good idea if I put the car back into the garage.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  And now I know that you have to go straight into the garage, that means the tires need to be straight. And so I need to check. So I get out of the car, I look at the tires. They seem to be pointing a little bit to the right and I think I need to straighten the tires. So I go and I stand over in front of the tire on the left side. I got down on my knees, I wrap my arm around the tire and then I straighten it. Eh, except it wouldn't turn. I just need a better grip. I got a better grip of the tire. Eh, I couldn't make a turn. And then I thought, you know, okay, of course. I've actually never seen anybody straighten a tire by getting out and getting on their knees. They use the steering wheel.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  And I know how you use the steering wheel. What you do is you turn, you turn, you turn. And when the steering wheel stops turning, then the tires are straight. See, I know this because I've seen my father do this a thousand times. I get back in the car, I put my foot on the brake and I start turning, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. Okay, the steering wheel top and now the, um, the tires are straight. I tap the accelerator. The car begins to go in this weird direction that it's not supposed to be going in. Now I know I'm supposed to stop the car. I also know something else. I have always been told, when you drive the car, always keep your eyes on the road.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  Always keep your eyes on the road. So I'm keeping my eyes on the road and I know that my body will know what to do. So I tap something, the accelerator, and the car begins to go fast and then what I hear is

• 46:29Speaker 05

  and it stops.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  I got a problem.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  I try to open the door. I can't open the driver's side, so I have to climb out of the passenger side. And I look around the car. The car is kind of halfway in the garage, is halfway out of the garage. It has slid up against the entry of the garage and then kind of along the inner wall and then kind of hit the front wall.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  I think maybe the thing that I should do right now is pack my bags and move.

• 47:10Speaker 05

  And then I also remember the thing I have been taught. If you tell the truth, the truth will set you free. Well, the only thing the truth is going to get me right now is some belt action. So I know that that's not the thing to do. So I need something special. I am a talker, so I come up with a story, a really good one. And then I need to punctuate that story, so I faint. So I lie down on the ground. I close my eyes. I wait and I hope for the best.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  Shortly, as I know what would happen, I hear my mother's high heels as she's clacking up the driveway and she's with someone, our neighbor. She sees the car. She sees me. She kneels down on the ground. Harold, Harold. And the neighbor starts talking. He says, you know, I bet I know exactly what happened. Somebody actually wanted to come steal the car. Harold went outside to see what was going on. Harold got involved and now look at poor here is Chris Harold. And I think, that wasn't my story, but that's pretty good.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  So I think he continues and he says, look, I think we should call the police and the ambulance. And I think, no, I don't want the police and the ambulance. So I start coming to, oh, my woozy head. Oh, my woozy head. By this time, my father is now also coming up the driveway. And He kneels down, he says, Harold. And so now I'm awake, my parents are there, so I launch into my story. And my father says, no, no, no, no. Something seems to be wrong. You need to, um, let, let's just figure out what's happening with you. We can hear about the story later. And then dad said, look, what I want you to do is I want you to go to your bedroom.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  I want you to get in your bed and then your mother and I will be in in a few moments. I do that. I go to my room, I get in my bed and I wait. Now, one of the things you should know about my family is that my mother's name is Mary. My father's name is Joseph. I'm gonna let you, let that settle in for a moment. And my brother and sister and I have frequently tried to ask the question, so which one of us is Jesus today? Well, I know that given that my parents are strict disciplinarians, I need Jesus now. So I just wait to see what's going to happen.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  My dad comes in and he says, you seem to be okay right now. What I want you to do is I want you to get a good night's sleep. And tomorrow we'll talk about the car. Hmm. Next day, I can hear the family down in the kitchen. I start getting up and start moving really slowly. And I know that this is going to be my last day on earth. So I go down to the kitchen and I wait. Nothing, nothing is said. All that day, nothing is said.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  The next day, I know it's gonna happen. Nothing is said. The third day, nothing is said. Am I actually gonna be able to get away with this? You know, it may be that the feigning is actually working, so I double down. And I- I decide I need to add a flair. Now, I have actually never seen a person faint. I don't know what they really look like. I've only seen it on television. But it seems to me that when people faint that they get stiff. So with my routine, I added rigor mortis.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  So that every time I faint, I get as stiff as a board. Now, my parents are upset about this and they're concerned about what's going on. So I go to a lot of doctors and I have an EKG and I have EEG. And I have blood tests and I have urine tests. I sit in a lot of waiting rooms. I am committed to making this work because this is a thing that's saving my life. Well, over a long period of time, a really long period of time, the fainting continued and then it slowed down. And then, I guess it kind of stopped. And I must be cured. But I am still thinking about this issue.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  And I'm still thinking about the car. And I will do anything to keep from the conversation of going on with the car. And now, when I'm 17 years old, I actually refuse to talk to my parents about getting a driver's license because I'm afraid that the car issue might come up again.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Now, I know that you gotta be sitting out there wondering, why didn't his family talk about the car? Why didn't they? And to be honest with you, I have the slightest idea why they didn't talk about the car. But I do have a theory. See, my parents didn't have any problem at all in punishing me. They were disciplinarians. They knew exactly what to do. So for this instance, they were trying to find exactly the right thing. And they did. Silence. They refused to talk about it. And what does silence lead to? Guilt. And that's what I have been experiencing, is guilt. And now, 60 years later,

• 53:00Speaker 05

  I am 72 years old and we have not talked about this car. And I feel guilt.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  And while I feel this guilt, I also continue to remember the thing I have been taught. If you tell the truth, the truth will set you free. I am a talker and I've got to tell somebody. So I am here tonight to tell you, I did it. I wrecked the car. I faked the illness. Now please, set me free.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  That was Harold Cox. To see a picture of him and his siblings and his very patient parents, you can visit themoth.org, where you can also download the story. Harold is a university professor in Boston and sometimes shares personal stories in the classroom. He's happy to report that he hasn't pretended to faint since childhood and is now an excellent driver. While working on the story, I kept wondering what his family thought about all this. Harold was not willing to question his siblings because he still hasn't come clean to them. Perhaps they're listening now. The truth is out now, Harold. Really do hope it sets you free. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Thanks to all the storytellers for their truths. We hope you'll join us next time, and that's the story from The Moth.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Hixson, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co-producer was Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Marina Cluce, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jordan Cardinale, Kate Teller.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Uraina. Moth Stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Kid Reverie, Duke Levine, and Catalyst. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn all about The Moth, go to our website, themoth.org.