Penelope gave a big exaggerated sigh.
“She almost died, Mom, and all you can think about is you.” This actually wasn’t true. Deborah didn’t even come close to dying. The razor hurt too much, and the few cuts she managed to inflict were not deep at all.
“Excuse me, love,” her mother said, all fake British. “I’m on my way to possibly meeting the woman who gave birth to me. I think I’m allowed.”
Penelope didn’t answer. She and Julie had just been wondering how girls did it together, that’s all. Hadn’t they talked about that? Hadn’t they both said they didn’t know?
“You don’t do anything like that, do you?” her mother asked.
“Oh no,” Penelope said. “I give blow jobs and have sex with women.”
“Honestly, Penny,” her mother said, wrinkling her entire face in disgust. “Can’t you ever be honest?”
“I guess not,” Penelope said.
The radio played “Bridge over Troubled Water” for the millionth time.
“I hate that song,” Penelope mumbled, spinning the dial to change the channel. It reminded her of Deborah, poor Deborah locked in the psych ward, still pregnant, her parents arriving from Chicago any minute.
She stopped. The Beatles were singing “Penny Lane.”
“I thought you hated that song,” her mother said.
Penelope didn’t answer her. Instead, she sang along.
THE WOMAN AT THE DESK had on too much lipstick and old-fashioned cat-eye glasses, rimmed with rhinestones.
“I’m sorry, but only family is allowed,” she said, not looking at all sorry.
Penelope saw her mother twitch slightly at the word “family.”
“But you see, I am family,” she said.
The woman’s eyes scanned the paper she’d retrieved.
“No Martha,” she said finally.
“I wouldn’t be on the list. It’s complicated, but—”
“She’s dying,” the woman said. “The family’s been called and they’re all in there, waiting.”
“All of them? Are there a lot of children?”
The woman nodded. “Italians,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say. Penelope waited to see what her mother would do next, but her mother didn’t seem to have a plan. She wished she’d thought to get a joint from someone. Tonight, she would meet them down the hill and take acid with them. The acid was called Purple Haze, and it was in sugar cubes. All you had to do was let the sugar dissolve in your mouth, and before you knew it, you were tripping. Just yesterday that had frightened Penelope, but after everything that happened last night, she found herself wanting to do it.
Her mother walked across the small lobby. She sat on one of the faded couches. The place smelled like pee and strong disinfectant, the kind they used at school to cover the smell if someone puked. Penelope sat beside her.
“I have papers from the hospital. I was born on Valentine’s Day, 1919. Josephine Rimaldi gave birth to a baby girl that day and gave her up for adoption to a family in Vermont.”
She had repeated this information about a million times in the car. Penelope sighed. She thought about her own father, a real loser who had been married to her mother just long enough to get her preggers and then disappear. Whenever Penelope asked her mother why she’d married him in the first place, she said he reminded her of someone else. He’d shown up once, when Penelope was eleven. Her mother wouldn’t let him in the house, so Penelope had stood at the door to talk to him. He’d smelled of booze, and swayed in the doorway, a big man with a nose like Barney Rubble and pale-blue eyes. He said, “You’re a Collier. Don’t you forget that.” “Okay,” she said. He handed her a blond doll with eyes that opened and shut in a creepy fluttering motion. She hadn’t played with dolls since second grade. “Take care now,” he told her.
Penelope had no desire to go looking for Jim Collier. Why was her mother so obsessed with finding this woman?
All of a sudden, her mother was on her feet, practically running across the lobby.
“Stop! Please!” she called.
A sad-looking woman was lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.
“Are you related to Josephine Rimaldi, by any chance?” her mother asked.
“She’s my mother.”
Penelope watched as her mother took in this stranger’s face, as if she was trying to find some resemblance to her own.
“I think she’s my mother too,” she said finally.
The woman laughed. She inhaled her cigarette, then let the smoke out in a slow stream.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Her mother repeated the facts again.
But the woman shook her head. “There’s been some mistake,” she said. She frowned. “I remember talk about a baby who died,” she said, her frown deepening.
“I can understand changing the story. In those days—”
“She’s dying,” the woman said. “There’s no point.”
Before Penelope’s mother could say anything else, the woman was snuffing out her cigarette and moving away.