We talk for a while, about the Stanford-Berkeley rivalry, about California and which beaches are best for surfing, about the premed program. Before five minutes are up she’s acting a whole lot friendlier, still kind of wanting me to leave so she can buckle down and make whatever decision it is that she came up here to make, but also amused by my jokes, curious about me, charmed. She likes me, I can tell. My mom likes me, even if she doesn’t know that she’s supposed to love me. I’m relieved.
“Have you ever been inside Memorial Church?” I ask her when there’s a lull in the conversation.
She shakes her head. “I don’t go to church, as a rule.”
Interesting. Not that Mom was ever fanatical about church or anything, but I always got the impression growing up that she liked church. We only stopped going when I got to be a teenager, maybe because she thought that I’d do something in church that would give away that there was more to our family than met the eye. “Why not?” I ask. “What’s wrong with church?”
“They’re always telling you what to do,” she says. “And I don’t like to take orders.”
“Even from God?”
She glances at me, one corner of her mouth hooking up into a quiet smile. “Especially from God.”
Very interesting. Maybe I’m having a little too much fun with this conversation. Maybe I should tell her who I am, point-blank, stop messing around, but how do you break it to someone that you’re actually their as-yet-not-even-conceived child, come to visit them from the future? I don’t want to freak her out.
“So,” she says after a minute. “What did you come up here to think about?”
How to put this? “I’m supposed to go on a … trip, to help a friend who’s in a bad place.”
She nods. “And you don’t want to go.”
“I want to. She needs me. But I have a feeling that if I go, I won’t ever be able to really come back. Everything will change. You know?”
“Ah.” She’s looking at my face intensely, seeing something there. “And there’s a guy you’re leaving behind.”
Trust her to miss nothing, even now. “Something like that.”
“Love is a many-splendored thing,” she says. “But it is also a pain in the ass.”
I give a surprised laugh. She swore. I’ve never heard her truly swear before. Young ladies, she used to tell me all the time, do not swear. It’s undignified.
“Sounds like the voice of experience,” I say teasingly. “Is that what you came up here to think about? A man?”
I watch her carefully frame the words before she says them. “A marriage proposal.”
“Whoa!” I exclaim, and she chuckles. “That’s serious.”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “It is.”
“So he asked you?” Holy crap. This must be Dad she’s talking about. She’s up here trying to decide whether or not to marry Dad.
She nods, her eyes distant like she’s remembering something bittersweet. “Last night.”
“And you said …”
“I said I needed to think about it. And he said that if I wanted to marry him, to meet him today. At sunset.”
I give a low whistle, and she smiles in a pained way. I can’t help myself. “So are you leaning toward yes, or toward no?”
“Toward no, I think.”
“You don’t … love the guy?” I ask, suddenly out of breath. This is my future we’re talking about here, my entire existence on the line, and she’s leaning toward no?
She gazes down at her hands, at her ring finger, where there is very conspicuously no gorgeous engagement ring. “It’s not that I don’t love him. But I don’t think he’s asking me for the right reasons.”
“Let me guess. You’re loaded, and he wants to marry you for the money.”
She gives a little snort. “No. He wants to marry me because he wants me to have his child.”
Child, singular. Because she doesn’t know that there’s a Jeffrey in the plan.
“You don’t want kids?” I ask, my voice a tad higher than usual.