“… anyway, it was so strong a resemblance that people just assumed it was her baby! So”—Mary punctuated the end of her convolution by reaching for her coffee cup—“where’d that pitch-black hair and sweet little nose come from? She really doesn’t look like either of you.” Mary glanced at both Anna and Bruno. Neither spoke for a moment.
Anna froze. She’d never had to answer this question, though for a year now she’d rehearsed several responses. That’s what I looked like as a baby, my hair only lightened when I went to school. My mother’s mother was Italian (or Spanish). Well, when both mother and father carry recessive genetic traits, there’s a high probability that what’s dormant in the parents will become dominant in the offspring. You see, the nineteenth-century Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel hybridized some pea plants … These and more, Anna had practiced. But she hadn’t practiced them enough because when she most needed them, none came to mind. Jesus. I can’t remember anything. Anna bought time by shoveling a very large forkful of cake into her mouth. She avoided speaking aloud by pretending she couldn’t.
As far as Anna knew Bruno had never had to answer the question either. But he answered it. Without hesitation, without hedging. “My father’s uncle. Polly Jean looks like him. Her hair. Not her nose. His nose was much bigger.” Bruno declared the size of his uncle’s nose with the timing of a comic straight man.
“Which uncle?” Anna asked. She’d never heard this.
“Rolf.” Bruno didn’t have anything else to add. Anna tried to recall if she’d ever seen a picture.
Daniela piped in, “That’s right, Rolf had the thick black hair when he was younger, jo?”
Anna couldn’t tell whether Daniela was genuinely remembering a long-dead relative or if she was trying to somehow help—and if she was trying to help, was she coming to the aid of Anna or Bruno? “He had a big bristly black mustache, too. And,” she started to laugh, “I remember that he used to curl it like a Bavarian!”
“And give you fifty rappen if you shined his boots when he came to visit,” Ursula added from the kitchen. She’d changed Polly’s clothes and set her to rest in the bedroom and was now starting on the dishes. She’s in on this too? Anna took another bite of cake, an even bigger one, that she might have a moment of composure and talk herself down from that irrational ledge. No one’s in on anything. They’re just talking. Eat your cake, Anna. You don’t have to say a word. Eat your cake. You have your cake, now eat it, too.
Bruno stood and took his empty coffee cup into the kitchen. “Yes. That’s where she gets it. Rolf. Of course.” The answer satisfied Mary, who changed the subject. Anna relaxed. But only a little.