Co-Workers Prove It’s A Small World

Gil Beebe’s explanation is as good as any.

“This whole thing has been a miracle and God’s in the middle of it,” he says, shaking his big gray-haired head in wonder.

Terry Lloyd showers him with a smile saved for someone special. Until last fall, Gil was just her co-worker at Transitional Employment Services for the Handicapped in Coeur d’Alene. Then, his life and Terry’s collided in a fortunate coincidence that solved mysteries for both of them.

“We share a lot,” Terry says, closing her hand around the gold locket she wears.

Inside the locket is a picture of her biological father, the man Gil helped her find. Terry had wondered about Rick Cooper for most of her 26 years.

Rick was just a teenager when Terry was born. He was a tough guy, a high school druggie in San Jose, Calif.

Terry’s mother, Holly, gave birth at 17. She hoped the baby would shock Rick onto the right track. No such luck. So Holly swaddled 2-week-old Terry and disappeared.

She raised Terry in Montana, where she married Mick and had two more daughters and a son. Mick was a good dad who loved Terry as his own. Still, Terry knew someone else was responsible for her birth.

Terry married and moved to Coeur d’Alene four years ago. She took a teaching job at TESH, where Gil was a janitor.

Last summer, someone brought up adoption in the lunchroom. Gil had been adopted and had found his biological mom. Terry said she was searching for her father. All her mother would tell her was his name.

Her father would be about Gil’s age, she told Gil. He joked that he wasn’t the guy. She said she knew he wasn’t because his name wasn’t Rick Cooper.

“I used to know a Rick Cooper in San Jose,” Gil told her.

Terry remembers the goose bumps that seized her when she told him she’d been born in San Jose. Gil stared at her while the fuzzy picture in his brain developed like a Polaroid print.

“Your mom’s name is Holly,” he finally said, and Terry sunk to the floor.

Gil and Rick were high school buddies. Gil had a junior high crush on Holly, but she chose his buddy Coop. Gil remembered that Holly was pregnant and that she had disappeared. He hadn’t thought about her in years.

He knew Rick had been shot, spent time in prison. He figured Rick most likely was dead. To save himself, Gil had ditched his crowd and started a new, clean life in the Northwest.

For Terry, Gil volunteered to reconnect ties he’d severed 20 years earlier. He reached old buddies, heard about dead friends and some who had straightened up. Those people put the word out that Rick’s daughter was looking for him.

Months passed, feeding Gil’s suspicions that Rick was dead. Then Gil answered his phone last October and it was Rick. He’d gotten the word.

“He was excited, bubbling over. I didn’t expect that reaction,” Gil says. “I felt about 10 feet off the ground.”

Gil quizzed Rick about his life, and when he was convinced his old friend had been clean for 10 years, he gave him Terry’s phone number. Then Gil phoned Terry and told her to sit down.

“I started to cry. I thought he was about to tell me Rick was dead,” she says.

Four hours later, Rick phoned Terry. She found out she had two more sisters and a brother. Rick and Terry spoke every day for a week, then Terry pawned her wedding ring for the airfare to visit him.

It was a storybook reunion.

Terry looks like Rick, same nose. They yell at bad drivers the same way. He senses when she needs him. They both know Rick wasn’t father material 26 years ago and they don’t mourn the past.

The reunion has shattered Holly, who isn’t speaking to her daughter right now. But Terry’s stepdad understands her need to fill the blanks in her life.

Now, Gil has hope that he might find his biological father, maybe by dropping his name - Chuck Donaldson from Oakland, Calif. - the way Terry dropped Rick’s.

“There’s nothing like having that emptiness filled,” he says, with a long look at Terry’s content face. “Happy endings are very rare.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos