all the farm acreage along the highway, we sold a few more acres farthest from the house, where the highways intersected, and went to take a closer look at the Mahoney ranch we’d visited several times. The land was perfect: good pasture, a good well, a small pond, a line of deep, wide oaks shading the house, an eight-stall stable in good repair, and a sprinkling of early phlox along State Road 441. The house had four bedrooms, modern walk-in closets, and more than one bathroom. Still, I felt it wasn’t wise to take the first thing we saw. We had more money than I’d ever dreamed of having and it was hard for me to let go of it on the basis of what seemed more like luck than serious research. We considered other places but we kept going back to the Mahoney ranch.
Old Mr. Mahoney wanted to sell us the ranch, but he had begun losing patience. One day Adam walked in from work, sat down at the kitchen table, and frowned. “Evelyn, it’s okay if we buy the first thing we saw. You were what I saw when I opened my eyes for the first time on the floor of the farmhouse. I didn’t look for better when there was no need. There’s no need now. We’ve scoured three counties.”
I got the truck keys and we drove to the Mahoneys’ to make an offer. That summer, we moved to our own ranch.
The first thing I did by way of decorating the new house was hang the photo of me and Addie that Momma had shown me when she told me about my father, the only photo I had of the two of us together. In Florida, it was the sole proof that Addie had ever existed. No one there had ever met her, not even Pauline. For the girls, Addie was just a relation who had disappeared before they were born, someone who looked a lot like their momma. The picture revealed nothing of the link between Addie and Adam. I bought it a beautiful wood frame and hung it in the hall.
As I adjusted it on the hook, I could almost smell the innocence, the wide-open simplicity of that time. Grief shot through me, then a spasm of regret. I veered away from the sudden memory of the funeral and the girls’ faces afterward, when I silenced their father and pled with them to sing only in their normal voices.
They showed no sign of his vocal abilities. No sign of changing as Addie had. But recently I’d noticed how much the girls were becoming like him in other ways. It wasn’t just the enthusiasm for Florida that they shared with Adam. They’d begun to smell like him, first Gracie, now Rosie. Lately, when Gracie finished her shower, the bathroom smelled of fresh, newly mown grass, strong as the first time I’d bathed A., that cold winter morning so long ago. Once or twice recently, Rosie had smelled the same after a long day in the stables, the tart greenness underlying the odors of the horses and leather.
The girls had never seen the photo of me and Addie. They gathered around it when they came home from school.
Gracie peered over Sarah’s head. “How could the two of you look so much alike?”
Lil turned to me for an explanation, but I had none to give.
At that moment, Addie seemed so far removed from their world of school and the ranch, so unbelievable. I wanted suddenly, desperately, to have them understand everything. I wanted the riddle of their father’s origin to unfold like an exotic flower bearing its own explanation, a flower I could hold out in my palm. A mother’s offering: I know who your father is. I know what your father is.
I shrugged. “Cousins. We were cousins.”
“More like twins,” Lil said, not taking her eyes from the picture.
I herded them away from the photo. I couldn’t fit the story of their father into their world. Yet Adam’s identity was as close to them as their own skin. They carried him in their bones and their blood cells, too.
But not in their faces. They looked like me, not Adam or Roy Hope.
“Look what else I put up today while you were in school.” I showed them the measuring board from the farmhouse, now mounted in the doorway between the dining room and hall. “Who’s first? Sarah? Lil?” I pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket.
The girls knelt