Heart Like Mine A Novel - By Amy Hatvany Page 0,32

gray in your hair, Mama?” Kelli asked, and her mother leaned down to kiss Kelli’s forehead, as she did every night. When she pulled back, she smiled at Kelli.

“Because I’m forty-eight, sweet girl,” she said.

“Why doesn’t Janie’s mama have silver hair?” Kelli thought her mother’s hair was beautiful, like it belonged to one of the princesses from the fairy tales Kelli loved to read.

“Because I’m older than Janie’s mama,” her mother said, still smiling. “Most people have babies when they’re very young, but your father and I didn’t. You surprised us.”

Kelli thought about this, knitting her eyebrows together. “Was I an accident?” Kelli’s friend Pete had told her about how he overheard his parents talking about him as an accident—a baby they hadn’t wanted.

Her mother sat down on the edge of her bed and ran her hand along the side of Kelli’s cheek. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You weren’t an accident. You were a surprise. There’s a difference.”

“What kind of difference?”

“An accident is something you didn’t want. A surprise is something you didn’t realize how much you wanted it until it came along.”

Kelli had gone to sleep that night feeling loved. It was hard to remember it now, at fourteen, when her parents seemed so far away from her—so impossible to reach. She wondered sometimes if she’d been given to them by mistake. If she was adopted instead of born to them, simply because she was so fundamentally different from them both. She’d always tried to please them—to be quiet and respectful and comply with their requests. She was obedient, accompanying them to church every Sunday, helping her mother clean the house, leaving her father alone in the den so he could read his paper every night in peace. And yet . . . she imagined another family—the one she was meant to live with. Her fantasy mother would laugh more than she scolded; her father would gather her up for a cuddle on the couch, then help her with her homework. They’d have a dog and two cats, and maybe even another daughter so Kelli would have someone to giggle with in her bedroom into the wee hours of morning. She imagined a loud, messy house filled with happiness and love. A house entirely different from the one she lived in now.

She loved her parents, but she knew they didn’t understand her. Kelli had big dreams—she wanted the kind of passion she read about in the romance novels at the library. She longed for the rush of attraction, the kind of connection she never saw between her mother and father. They never held hands, never kissed more than a swift, dry peck on the lips. They followed strict routines, waking at five each morning to read the Bible and pray together—something Kelli had begun refusing to do just this year. She wasn’t sure she believed everything they believed. She didn’t feel Jesus the way they said she should, even though she had asked Him into her heart seven times, just to be sure He took.

Just last Sunday after church, as they’d walked home together, she’d even been courageous enough to ask her father how he knew there really was a God. He’d looked at her with a cloudy expression, his pale blue eyes narrowing. “I know because I know,” he said, and Kelli thought that was a meaningless response. She tried again.

“But how do you know? I don’t understand how you can believe in something you can’t see.”

Her father stopped, grabbed her arm, and gave her another stern look. “It’s called having faith, young lady. You don’t see God, you feel Him. Do you understand?”

Kelli nodded, a little frightened by the grip of her father’s hand. He so rarely touched her anymore, it felt foreign. Unnatural.

“Thomas,” her mother said, reaching out to pull his hand off of their daughter, and they’d walked the rest of the way home in silence. Kelli’s mother recognized her daughter starting to pull away from them—away from God—and she felt helpless to do anything to stop it. All she could hope was that Kelli might learn the error of her ways and come back to them. All she could do was pray.

Kelli thought about that moment all week long as she considered how to ask her parents if she could go to the basketball game. She knew her parents would never let her go. At the beginning of the year, she’d brought up the idea of trying out to be a cheerleader. “Why would