“…his real mother is a wealthy widow named Joan Whitcomb,” the driver whispered, and I heard the creak of his truck seat as he shifted. “He said that the woman who raised him was a kind of nanny. I am so sorry. I probably should not be telling you this. But I thought somebody ought to.” I stood in my kitchen with the telephone against my ear and a dish towel in my hand. Outside, the evening sun slanted across the yard. A small bird was bathing in the dish by the window. I looked at the photograph the driver had sent, and at the caption, and at the face of my sister.
Joan was fifty nine, three years younger than I, and twenty years had passed since I had last seen her. We had grown up in a two bedroom house in Scranton, sharing a bed until I married. When our mother was ill, we quarreled over money and care, bitterly, and she left in the night. She married a man in Connecticut with a great deal of money, and she never called again. I had written her letters for the first five years. None had been answered. And now here she was, smiling in a stranger house, beside my son, under the words Our Beloved Mother.
I did not cry. I put the towel down, took my keys from the hook, and drove the forty minutes to my son house. It was a beautiful new colonial with black shutters and a wide porch, and cars lined the street for a block. I recognized the flower arrangement lying in the trash can on the front walk, my pink peonies, with their ribbon torn off. I took a long breath, picked up my purse, and walked past the delivery truck. The driver was sitting at the wheel, looking miserable. He raised a hand, and I nodded to him, grateful and grim, and went up the steps.
A bouquet in the trash, a driver on the phone, and a living room full of photographs of the wrong woman.
Nobody stopped me. The front door stood open, and the sound of laughter drifted out from the living room, with the clink of glasses and a jazz record. In the foyer hung a gallery of framed photographs. There was my son Peter on the porch with his arm around Joan. There was Peter and his wife Amber at a table with Joan between them, all three raising champagne. There were a dozen of them. In none of them was I. I stood in the hall for a moment, holding the strap of my purse. Then I walked into the living room, where forty people were turning, one by one, to look at me.
Peter saw me first. He went the color of paper. Amber, beside him, in a sleek silver dress, put her hand to her throat. I scanned the room. There, by the fireplace, in a navy silk blouse and pearls, stood my sister. Her hair was silver. Her face, thin and elegant, had hardened with age. She saw me and went completely still. A glass trembled in her hand. “Hello, Joan,” I said. My voice carried clearly across the room. “I understand that I am to be congratulated. It appears that you have a son.”
There was a terrible silence. Peter started forward, whispering “Mom, please,” and I held up my hand. I did not take my eyes off Joan. She set down her glass very carefully on the mantel. “Nell,” she said. She walked across the room, stopped in front of me, and said quietly, “I did not say that. I want you to know that I did not say it.” She turned to face the guests. Her voice, when it came, was clear and cold and carrying. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Joan Whitcomb. I am this young man aunt. I am not his mother. His mother is this woman.”
A collective gasp ran around the room. Amber covered her mouth. A man in a blazer, whom I took to be her father, stared at my son with an expression of dawning fury. Joan continued, “I came here today because Peter told me his mother was too ill to attend. I see now that it was not true.” She turned to him, and her voice dropped. “Peter, you asked me to play a part, and I agreed because I was lonely and ashamed. I should have refused. Your mother gave you everything she had, including thirty thousand dollars for this house. She has earned a seat at the head of this table.”
Peter began to weep. He did not make a speech. He sat down on the arm of a sofa and put his hands over his face. I walked over to him, and I laid my hand on his bowed head, as I had a thousand times when he was a child. “I would have liked to come,” I said softly. “I would not have embarrassed you.” He looked up. His eyes were swollen. “Mom,” he said. “I was ashamed. I thought they would think less of us. I thought you would not fit.” I smiled sadly. “Peter, I have never fit into a room in my life,” I said. “But I always walked into it.”
The party dissolved quietly. Amber father shook my hand at the door and said in a low voice that he was honored to meet me. Joan stayed behind. We sat on the back porch with two glasses of lemonade, watching the fireflies rise over the lawn. For a while she said nothing. Then she told me that her husband had passed three years earlier, that she had no children, that she had grown terribly lonely. She had found Peter through an online family tree. “I wanted to be needed,” she said. “I forgot that I already had a sister.”
I forgave her, in the end, because there is only so much room in a life for grudges. We have lunch every Tuesday now, at a small place in town with checkered tablecloths. She is helping me plan a trip to Italy. Peter and Amber visit on Sundays, and he calls me every night, and he has asked me to teach him how to make my pot roast. Last week, he showed me the new gallery in the foyer. Every photograph of Joan had been replaced. In the center hung an old snapshot of Peter at six, on my lap, in a striped shirt, laughing into the sun.
