The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,79

know this way, but it is not about you. It’s not about any of you, but I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, I guess. I don’t know, I thought you might be, like, happy or something.”

“We are happy,” my father said. “As long as you’re happy.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “So! When are you due?”

“We’re very happy,” my mother interjected. “A grandchild!” she said.

“End of February,” Lucy said.

“And who is the father? Where is the father? Is no one asking about the father?” I asked.

There was silence.

“What color is the father?” I laughed. Perhaps this would be a family with two Hispanic children.

“That’s enough,” my mother said. “It’s that boy she was traveling with. Lucy has already told us this.”

Lucy nodded again. “Greif is the father—he’s white, for whatever that’s worth—but, as I said, he’s in Baja, he didn’t want to come back, and I did. I wanted to be with my family.” She made an effort to hold back tears.

I rose and then sat next to my sister. “This is really great news.” I patted her hair along her back, as if she were a pony. “It’s wonderful news. It’s just shocking.”

“I think so,” Ramon said. “I mean, that it’s terrific news.”

“We all do,” my father said. “It’s a girl,” he stated. “Right, Lucy?”

Lucy smiled and nodded. “A lot could happen. I mean, she’s not here yet.”

“Well, I’m here to say,” my father said, “that daughters are just the most wonderful thing.” He got up to crack open another bottle of pinot noir. “Just the most wonderful things.”

_______

It was my mother’s famous forty-garlic-clove chicken for dinner, and this time the fame I could get behind, as it was a dish I remembered having eaten repeatedly. Lucy sat across from me, my parents at the heads of the table. But for Ramon beside me, it was as if I had never left this table.

My mother spooned rice onto our plates and served the chicken out of the red Dansk casserole dish I will always associate with company, and we passed a big wooden bowl of salad, and I heard Harriet come into the room, and it was, for a moment, so pleasant to be there. Every time I looked across at Lucy, I would feel a swelling of happiness at seeing her again, and then an acute sadness whose source I would not name.

“So what is the plan, Lou?” my father asked. “We want to hear all about your travels, too, but I need to know the plan.”

Lucy moved the food around on her plate. “Let me start by saying, this was planned. Well, let me back up. When I was in El Salvador, I got pregnant, uh, accidentally. That was last January, I guess, so after I lost that—”

“You lost it?” I asked.

“Yes.” She looked down, touching the chicken several times with the tines of her fork.

“I’m so sorry!” I said. I remembered what that was like, the way it just slipped away, the life you’d begun to imagine and the thing itself that let you imagine it.

“Sorry, Lucy,” Ramon said. “That’s terrible. Especially alone.”

“Greif was there! Greif has been great. Really. He started giving surf lessons to other tourists to take care of us. He was on board until I decided I wanted to leave. Leave Mexico, or any of the other beach places. Leave that whole mode. It didn’t make sense to me if I had a child. In any case, after that I realized I was at that age when you’re supposed to worry; everyone kept saying that if I wanted a baby, the time was now, how if I had the faintest desire I would regret not trying later, how in childbearing years I was already old, how my eggs were old, and then everything that had happened to Jesse”—she held her hand toward me, as if we didn’t know me and my plight by now—“and so I decided I wanted to try. I wanted there to be a baby in the family.”

I startled at this stinging sentiment, spoken so freely, as I did not want to be the focus of this dinner. In childbearing years I was now ancient. And so I went in for more chicken, tearing a thigh apart, first with my knife and fork, and then taking the bones up with my hands. It was succulent. Had I been wrong? Perhaps my mother had always cooked. Perhaps we had been eating out of that red Dansk casserole dish since the invention