Jennifer Skiles watched the clock, waiting for 7 p.m. That’s when Paul Lonardo, her biological father, whom she’d never met, said he would call.
Skiles, now 46, had no idea what her father’s voice would sound like. But she had imagined it — imagined him — more times than she could count.
When Lonardo, now 66, finally spoke, Skiles said, it did not feel like a stranger was on the line. He sounded instantly familiar.
“It felt like home,” Skiles said. “Like I had known him my whole life.”
The 2022 call came after years of searching through records and DNA databases, and piecing together tidbits of information. Skiles, who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, was adopted at 3 years old, and began looking for her biological parents when she was 19.
Lonardo, who lives in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no idea Skiles existed. Earlier that same year, his son received a message from a woman looking for a man named Paul Lonardo who had been stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey in the late 1970s. The woman, Skiles, claimed to be his daughter.
“It was obviously pretty shocking,” said Lonardo.
He served in the Army from 1975 to 1979 and was stationed in New Jersey, California and Rhode Island. He got married shortly after leaving the Army and became a carpenter. He and his wife have three children.
Skiles and Lonardo quickly arranged a time to talk.
“How tall are you?” Lonardo remembered asking on the call.
“Five-one-and-a-half,” Skiles said.
Lonardo laughed. His late mother was 4-foot-11 and often told people she was 4-foot-11-and-a-half.
“That half inch clearly meant a lot to both of them,” Lonardo said.
Then came more similarities.
“What hand do you write with?”
Left, they both said.
“Blood type?”
A positive, they each answered.
“The way we think, the way we talk — we just knew,” Lonardo said. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
They made a pact that night that they were going to talk every day, Skiles said. “We had already missed enough time.”
Soon after, they did a paternity test, and the results came in on Father’s Day 2022. They read them over the phone, confirming what they already knew.
“It was just so exciting,” Skiles said. “I knew I loved him.”
“We’re family; you can never have too much of that,” her father said. “It wasn’t hard to make the decision that she would be part of our family.”
About two months later, Lonardo flew to Knoxville to meet his daughter. She picked him up at the airport, and they hugged as though they had done it a million times. They happened to be wearing a similar shade of blue that day.
“We had such an in-sync connection,” Skiles said.
Lonardo met Skiles’s biological mother, Cheryl Brown, in the late 1970s while they were both stationed at Fort Dix. During a weekend off, they decided to travel to New York City together.
They stayed at the Hotel Chelsea, Lonardo recalled, and visited the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. They had a fleeting romance, and shortly after they returned to Fort Dix, they went in different directions and never spoke again. But for nearly five decades, Lonardo has kept a bar of soap from the hotel.
“I like saving mementos to remember an occasion,” he said. “That was a really nice place, and it was a fun thing.”
Still, he had no idea that the small bar of soap would one day connect that weekend to a daughter he didn’t know he had.
Skiles was born in 1979 on a military base in Germany. She spent the first three years of her life with her biological mother, and moved to Virginia Beach, where she was adopted by a family in Bristol, Virginia.
Skiles has happy early memories of her adoptive family, such as sitting around the dinner table with her parents and four siblings, sharing home-cooked meals. She was the only child adopted in the family.
“It was a simple, idyllic life,” said Skiles, who did not know until age 7 that she was adopted.
Skiles describes a home life that began to fracture when she was 12. Then, when she was 18, her adoptive father died of a heart attack. About seven years later, her adoptive mother died of cancer and two of her siblings cut ties with her, she said.
“I felt like I had lost everybody all at one time,” she said. “It was so hurtful.”
The year prior, in 2004, Skiles had traveled with her then-husband to Germany to obtain a copy of her original birth certificate, with the hope of finding her biological parents. At the time she was able to find her mother’s Social Security number, though her father’s name was not on the birth certificate.
About a year after her adoptive mother’s death, Skiles used the information to find what she thought was her birth mother’s address in Texas and wrote a letter to her.
“I came home to a shaky voicemail on my answering machine, and she asked for me to call her back and I did,” Skiles said. “It was wonderful.”
Skiles learned that her mother put her up for adoption because she was in an abusive relationship and was worried for her daughter’s safety. Brown did not go on to have more children.
The mother and daughter became like “two peas in a pod,” Skiles said. They spoke daily and went on several vacations together.
But then, in 2017, Brown died in a car crash.
“I only had her for 12 years,” said Skiles, who has three children, ages 19, 23 and 24. “It was horrific.”
Before her death, Brown shared the name of Skiles’s birth father and recounted the story of their weekend in New York City. Skiles searched online and on social media but couldn’t find him.
“I could tell she wanted so badly for me to find him,” Skiles said. “She was very supportive.”
After her mother died, Skiles doubled down on her search to find her dad. In 2022, she did an Ancestry DNA test, and three months later, she learned she was connected to a Lonardo family in Rhode Island.
“If I had known, she would have never been up for adoption,” Lonardo said.
In the four years since finding each other, Lonardo and Skiles have visited each other every few months. Lonardo has embraced Skiles’s husband and three children, and Skiles has developed close bonds with Lonardo’s wife and her three newly found siblings.
Skiles has been referring to Lonardo as Dad since their first phone call, and her children call him Grandpa.
“We’re making up for lost time,” said Lonardo, who put Skiles’s baby photos around his house. “We just have a blast.”
Skiles has also gone on two trips to Italy to learn more about her Italian roots from her father’s side.
“She’s been telling me stuff that I never knew about my own family,” Lonardo said. “It’s pretty cool.”
A few months ago, Lonardo asked Skiles a question she had long wanted to hear.
“How about we make it right?” Lonardo asked her. “Would you mind if I adopt you?”
Skiles was moved to tears.
“I always wanted his name on my birth certificate, and now it would be,” she said.
The whole extended family went to city hall in Cranston on Jan. 22, and Lonardo was officially designated as Skiles’s father. The whole courtroom broke out in applause, many in tears.
“You had to be there,” Lonardo said. “I was very happy. … I hope that others have the same luck I had.”
Skiles — who chronicled her story of finding her birth parents in a book called “Vault of Treasures” — said she feels lucky, too.
“I want to give people hope,” Skiles said. “That something really beautiful could still be around the corner.”
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