ALICE WAITED FOR HER MOTHER at the Greek restaurant that Julia liked. She didn’t mind her mother being late. During work hours, Alice lived in her head and in whatever manuscript she was editing—questioning the details of each line—so after hours she initially found conversation, with its awkward pauses, questions, and changes of topic, challenging. She liked her work for the quiet and for the details. She was able to take a book and check, change, and verify that every single fact and timeline was airtight. When she was finished with a manuscript, she knew—and her employer appreciated—that it was as correct as was humanly possible.
The waiter kept refilling Alice’s water, and she kept drinking because it felt like the polite thing to do after he’d gone to the effort.
“I don’t want to be rude,” the waiter said, when he came by with the water pitcher again. “But do you play for the Liberty?”
“No, I work in publishing,” Alice said.
The waiter blushed. “I’m sorry. I just thought…”
“It’s okay.” If she was in the right mood, Alice was amused by how her tallness bothered people. Her height immediately exposed men (it was usually men) who had any insecurity. If a guy was a jerk about Alice’s size, he was a jerk. She didn’t think this waiter was a jerk necessarily, but it didn’t reflect well on him that he couldn’t come up with more than one career option for a tall woman. Or that he couldn’t just keep his mouth shut.
Alice felt her mother’s energy enter the room and smelled her perfume. She looked toward the door. “Hi, Mom,” she said. A wave of cool air hit the back of Alice’s neck; it was the beginning of November, and New York City was toying with the idea of winter. Alice hadn’t seen her mother for a few weeks, which was unusual. Julia had been busy with work. “You’re wearing too much perfume.” Alice wrinkled her nose.
“Am I?” Julia sat across from her and immediately looked down at the menu, even though she always ordered the same thing: a Greek salad with a glass of white wine. “I must have forgotten and reapplied it before I left the office.”
Alice studied her mother and noticed she was wearing fresh lipstick too. Julia usually stripped away her office look before she saw her daughter; today she seemed to have doubled down. Julia’s hair was in a bun, as usual, but a curl had escaped on one side. Alice was looking at the rogue curl when her mother said, “I have a series of things to tell you.”
“A series?” Alice smiled. She assumed this was going to be about a new work client, hiring more employees, and perhaps a piece of art that Julia had bought. Her mother sometimes presented her transactions to Alice because she found them exciting, not noticing that her daughter had never had any interest in her mother’s accumulation of wealth or professional prestige. When Alice had taken her first copyediting assignment, Rose said, “I know you chose that kind of job to drive your mother crazy. And it’ll work.” Rose meant the kind of job with low wages, no ladder to climb, and no way to win. Alice had laughed at this. “You’re a little right, Grandma,” she’d said. But she also liked her work and the lack of politics involved. The stock market had crashed earlier that fall, and Alice thought the ladders her mother valued so highly were made of rotten wood. Her friends were all struggling financially, despite their college degrees. Carrie was a bartender who had published six poems in literary journals and was working on a collection. Rhoan lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his three brothers and was making minimum wage at an internship for an arts library, even though he’d earned a master’s degree.
“My sister Sylvie is dying,” Julia said.
Alice’s attention snapped back to the present. “Dying?” She remembered the photographs she’d found in her mother’s bedside table years earlier. The four sisters with curly hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sylvie is the one closest to you in age, right?”
“When I was pregnant with you, I sometimes slept with Sylvie, on a couch. We shared a bedroom when we were children. We used to be very close.”
Alice tried to imagine her mother as a little girl, sharing a bedroom with another little girl. Julia had just spoken more about her childhood in ninety seconds than she had in the entirety of Alice’s life. Alice felt an uncertainty inside herself, as if furniture were being shoved into an empty room. She said, “Will you go back to Chicago to see her?”
Julia made a strange face, as if she were fighting tears, or maybe a smile. “No,” she said. She pushed at her hair lightly and said, “Sylvie is married to your father.”
Sylvie is married to your father. Alice ran this sentence through her head, but there were too many errors for a copy editor to fix. The structure buckled under its own weight. She tried a tense change: “Sylvie was married to my father?”
Julia shook her head.
The inside of Alice echoed, cavelike. “You’re not making sense, Mom.”
“Your father was the one who called to tell me Sylvie is sick.”
“But my father is dead.”
“I told you that because he gave up his parental rights to you while you were still a baby. He had mental-health issues, and I think he didn’t feel capable of being a father. But I didn’t want you to feel rejected or feel like it had anything to do with you, because it didn’t.”
“Wait.”
Julia waited.
Alice wanted clarity; she wanted to make sure she understood the mechanics of what was being said. “You’re saying that my father gave me up, and because of that, you told me that he was dead?”
There was a visible vein in Julia’s temple. “It seemed simplest to tell you that. It felt like a kind of truth. His name is William Waters, and he lives in Chicago.”
Alice shook her head. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, as if her organs were moving around her body. She wasn’t sure what her mother said after that or even if she said anything. Alice smiled reflexively at the waiter, who was passing by, and felt a spear sink through her body. Alice missed something. She missed—wildly—everything she had wanted when she was young. She needed a backup to her mother, who was saying crazy things while wearing too much perfume and too much makeup. She needed a sibling to roll her eyes at. She needed someone else to say, Don’t listen to her. She’s lost her mind. You’re fine. None of this is true.
“Excuse me,” Alice said, not to her mother but to the tablecloth and the waiter, if he was listening. She pushed back her chair and walked with wobbly legs across the restaurant and out the door. She stood in the dim nighttime air. Broadway was in front of her, a steady grumble of taxis and buses. Building windows were lit yellow against the night sky. Alice’s heartbeats were still registering in her ears.
Alice pulled her phone out of her backpack, quickly scrolled through her contacts, and pressed the call button.
The phone rang three times, and then Rose said, “Hello?”
“Grandma.”
“Alice!” Rose sounded pleased. Alice usually tried to call her grandmother a few times a month, because she knew Rose was lonely.
“My mother just told me that my father is alive.”
There was a shocked silence through the phone. “Gracious,” Rose said finally.
“Is it true?” Alice said.