Natalie explained the assignment in low tones, keeping her eyes on the table. Her mother wiped her hands on a dish towel, then came over to join her daughter. She looked at the tree on the paper, and then back at Natalie. “Family’s a complicated thing, honey,” she said. “It has more to do with who takes care of you, not who gave birth to you. That girl doesn’t fit in that category.”
“Oh,” Natalie said, feeling the inside of her chest start to burn. She hated that her mom used the term “that girl” when she referred to Natalie’s birth mom. It made Natalie feel dirty, as though the woman who had carried Natalie in her belly was someone of whom she should be ashamed. “Sorry.” She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for, but she knew she was responsible for the strained look on her mother’s face.
“It’s fine,” her mom replied. “You can just use that other leaf for Aunt Vicki . . . okay?” Vicki was Natalie’s father’s sister, who lived on a ranch in Montana. They saw her once a year, at Christmas, and the only thing Natalie knew about her was that she wasn’t married and her clothes smelled like horses.
“Okay,” Natalie said, even though she felt like it was wrong to exclude her birth mother from the assignment. She waited a moment before another question bubbled up inside her, escaping before Natalie could stop it. “Was I a terrible baby?” she asked. “Is that why my birth mom didn’t want me?”
Her mother pressed her lips together and shook her head, looking like she was about to cry. “You were perfect,” she said, giving her daughter a bright, false smile. “What should we have for dinner?” she asked, making it clear that the subject was closed.
But thoughts of her birth mother wouldn’t leave her alone. Natalie often fantasized that her “other” mom might just show up and whisk her away to an entirely different life. Natalie made up stories about the circumstances surrounding her adoption. Maybe she works for the FBI, she’d thought. Maybe living in her car was part of her job and she had to travel so much catching bad guys that she couldn’t take me with her. Her parents said they had the paperwork that made Natalie’s adoption legal, but they wouldn’t let her see it. They swore there was nothing more detailed in it than what they had already told her.
Now, Natalie pulled up in front of her client’s beautiful three-story, red-brick home with only three minutes to spare, and tried to erase thoughts of her adoption from her mind. “I’ll be right back, okay?” Natalie told Hailey as she pulled the keys from the ignition and unfastened her seat belt. Her client, an older woman hosting a birthday party for a friend, stood on the front porch, waiting, thin arms crossed over her chest. “Just have to run the boxes into the house.”
“I can help,” Hailey said, momentarily distracted from the subject of her family tree project.
Natalie turned around to smile at her daughter. “I appreciate that, sweetie, but it’s raining. You just sit tight.” She ran around to the back of her car and opened the hatch, then carefully lifted two of the lavender boxes and carried them up to the house as quickly as she could. After two more trips, her client handed her a check and Natalie climbed back into her car, shaking droplets of rain from her head.
“See?” she said to Hailey. “Easy-peasy.”
“Guess what?” Hailey said. “I hate peas.”
Natalie laughed, flipped a U-turn in the middle of the street, and drove south toward Henry’s preschool, which was only a few blocks from their house. She headed down the hill toward Alki Beach, planning to take the back way to Henry’s school through residential streets instead of dealing with all the traffic and lights on California Avenue. She and Kyle had bought their two-story Craftsman on Gatewood Hill after he made partner last year, and they were still in the process of tweaking its features to make it their own. So far, they’d painted every wall with warm, natural hues, replaced all the appliances, and pulled up the carpets to refinish the original hardwood floors. Natalie had just received approval on a small business loan for Just Desserts, which would be spent remodeling the stand-alone garage they weren’t using for anything but storage into a professional kitchen so she could take on bigger jobs. She’d already found and purchased a barely used commercial convection oven, a triple sink, and an enormous stainless-steel, double-door refrigerator-freezer on Craigslist; all she needed was to hire a contractor to bring the wiring up to code, put down a tile floor, and Sheetrock the walls, and she’d be in business. She often wondered if she had inherited her love of baking from the woman who’d given her up; her adoptive mother’s skills in the kitchen consisted mostly of being able to artfully arrange the takeout she’d ordered on their dinner plates. Natalie wondered if she would understand herself better if she met her birth mother. Would she know from whom Hailey had gotten her violet eyes?
“Are you okay, Mommy?” Hailey asked, snapping Natalie out of her thoughts.