Seeking God Knows What

By DEE MORRISON

GRAND RAPIDS — Steve Flaig works with his mom. That’s not all that unusual. But Steve was adopted as a baby, and never knew his birth mom.

Until he started working with her.

Flaig had been searching online for his birth mother for four years and found nothing. Then he realized he was misspelling her last name. He fixed that and got the home address of a woman in Grand Rapids.

“I thought that’s really close to Lowe’s, where I work,” he told 24 Hour News 8, “and I bet I’ve seen her in this store, not realizing to what extent I’d seen her in the store.”

When he told a co-worker how the correct spelling of his birth mom’s last name - Tallady - led him to an address in the city, his co-worker asked him a question.

“She said, ‘Do you mean like the Chris Tallady who’s here, the head cashier up front?’”

A Lowe’s manager looked up Christine Tallady’s home address, and it matched. He had found his mother, but didn’t know what to say. So he waited.

“Just seeing her at work and thinking, that’s my mom,” he said, “this is very strange.”

Last week, an adoption agency worker agreed to break the news to Tallady, but explained only that a co-worker named Steve was the son she had given up for adoption 22 years ago.

But there are several Steves at the Plainfield Avenue Lowe’s.

She asked the manager to check the files because, she said, “I just knew it was Steve Flaig. It just had to be.” She gave the manager her son’s birthdate, “and she said, ‘He’s your son.’ And I just, Oh My God!”

For eight months, the cashier and the delivery guy had worked together, joked around, never suspecting they were mother and son. Now they’re easing from co-workers into family members.

“He’s a good person,” Tallady said. “That’s what I was hoping for, that he’d turn out to be a good person.”

They like what they see in each other and in their future. “I want to meet his mom and dad,” she said, “because they did such a good job. He’s such a good guy.”

Tallady had two more children, and has seven brothers and sisters. So Steve has a half-brother and half-sister, aunts, uncles and cousins to meet and get to know.

There is suddenly a much bigger family to celebrate Christmas with this year, and they plan to celebrate together.