The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,28

had I known I had another mother, just in the next town or state. I could, in these fraught moments, tell my mother I liked this other mother better, or worse, that I was leaving to find her. What would I do if my daughter left for her biological mother?

The lawyer, with her purple hair, her lost furniture, her fears, made every ounce of sense now. Someone else out there will always be the mother. This is true for the lawyer’s children as well—it is the biology of adoption—but that mother will be unfindable.

Better, I thought then, to colonize a country, take the Chinese children, the Koreans, the Ethiopian babies that, yes, I knew would be black than to live through the thought of the mother’s arriving, or worse, perhaps, the anticipation of her sure departure. I had no idea what the effect of her going, leaving that teenager only to disappear, would be.

“There’s no guarantee of anything with children of your own either, genetic children, I mean,” Tiffany or Crystal said.

“That’s a good point. Nothing in life is guaranteed. It just isn’t.” Gabe shared this with the rest of us.

“Exactly,” Crystal or Tiffany said.

Family, just the word. Even second generation.

There it was: my grandfather holding my hand in the dark movie theater as we watched the red balloon in the film, hovering over the streets of Paris, waiting for its chosen little boy. I imagined it now, my grandfather long gone, the balloon that birthmother held, lingering at my window, and then following me down the streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood, past our butcher and our cheese shop, the yoga studios that weren’t there when I moved in, past the restaurants with their local and sustainable food, past the park with the fountain kids run through all summer long. It waits for me at Harriet’s favorite grassy hill, where it will meet all the other pink metallic unicorn balloons in Brooklyn, and it will soar up into the sky, far above my brownstone-lined borough, above our city; all the balloons, together, will carry me high into the air, and very far away.

8

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My mother stood waiting at the door with Harriet like June fucking Cleaver when we reached my parents’ house late Sunday night.

“How’d it go?” Her arms were open.

“Fine.” I put down my bags and caught Harriet’s paws in my arms, leaned in for her smooches.

“So,” she said, eyes wide. “Where’s our new grandchild?”

I stood up from Harriet and looked at my mother. “You can’t be serious.” I placed her front legs back on the floor.

That was when my father came out of the living room.

“Hi, guys.” He kissed us both.

“It’s going to be a wait, Joanne,” Ramon said. He turned to my father. “It could be a long wait for a baby,” he said.

My father shifted his feet. “Sure. Of course it will be a wait. Of course.”

“I mean, Jesus, Mom.”

“Honey, I was joking.” My mother went into the living room for the spread of cheeses and a tapenade I now saw on the coffee table. “I just hope it comes before I’m too old to get on the ground and play with it.”

I let out a sound that resembled the initial escape of steam in a humidifier, the warm steam of illness.

“Sweetie, Mom’s been really hoping this weekend went well. Just so you know. We can’t wait to hear about it. I made venison!” My father clapped his hands together.

“And I made risotto,” my mother interjected. “Right?”

“Your mother made her famous tri-mushroom risotto. The mushrooms are from the farmer’s market.”

My mother’s famous risotto? Famous to whom? I knew I’d certainly never tasted it or heard tell of it. I also knew my mother was not aware of any other mushroom variety than the porcinis she got at the Safeway (did she even know they were porcinis?) until she started reading Alice Waters and talking about the importance of eating together, as a family, though of course by then neither my sister nor I lived at home.

Ramon said, “Well, that sounds positively delicious!”

Ramon was always so sweet to my parents, but the truth is, he has a delicate, catered-to-by-an-old-world-mother constitution, which makes him sensitive to just about everything physical, and we’d eaten so much meat the night before I knew it sounded as revolting to him as it did to me.

I, however, had the energy for only one battle. “Well, we’re exhausted and I don’t really want to talk about it, okay?” I cleared my throat. “Dinner sounds