“Are you here about my phone calls?” I asked. But that was too indirect. “Are you here about my sister, I mean. I don’t remember leaving you a message.”
“Well, I’m about the only one in Fulton County who hasn’t heard from you. You left a lot of messages,” she said. “I’m a supervisor now, not a caseworker, but you’re a former foster kid, trying to find a younger sibling in the system. You know that’s going to rate high as watercooler talk. Once I heard your name, I had to see if you were the same Paula I remembered, even though the case isn’t under my jurisdiction. I found your picture on your firm’s website. I knew it was you like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You got even taller, but your face is exactly the same. I thought, Look at that! Another one of Mrs. Mack’s girlies, making good.”
She was chatting at me as if this were a social call. Perhaps this was the necessary small talk people did before they got down to it? Nick was so much better at this part. It was not my bailiwick, but I gave it my best try.
“I remember that. Mrs. Mack calling us her girlies,” I said.
“She was good to me,” Shar said. “I don’t think you knew her like I did. You had a mama coming for you, and she didn’t try to get in between that. She was different with us on the adoption track. Especially the ones like me—I’d been suspended three times for fighting. Not like I had sets of perfect parents lining up to bid. She kept up with me even after I aged out. She was my oldest son’s godmother, before she passed.”
“Oh. I’m sorry for your loss. It sounds like she was lovely to you,” I said, awkward and formal. Shar still looked expectant, maybe wanting the nutshelled version of my life in return, post–foster care. Instead I asked another question. “You keep up with anybody else, from back in those old days?” As I spoke I heard how far I’d sunk into the rhythms of her speech. You keep up, without the word do at the front. That wasn’t how I talked now.
I wondered if my presence was pushing her diction back in time as well. Her accent was on the spectrum common to professional women of any race here in Atlanta, similar to mine, but this was a matter of sentence structure. The rhythm of her story was a song straight out of the time we’d spent together. Back when we were Mrs. Mack’s girlies, as Shar had styled us.
“Me and Kim stayed tight,” Shar said. “She had a kid when she was young. A girl. Twelve now, and a pistol. Kim got married to a good man, though, a couple years back. They have a baby boy. He’s the fattest little thing. So cute. Looks like he’s made out of pudding. Got all those little knee fats and elbow fats. Makes me miss those baby days. Not enough to go back to them, mind you.”
I was interested in spite of myself and all the context in the room. “What about Karice? Did you keep up with her?”
Shar’s expression sobered. She shrugged in a way that didn’t mean she didn’t know. She knew all right, but she wasn’t going to talk about it. I could fill in the blanks: Karice was dead or missing or some known flavor of ruined. She, too, had fallen off the world.
“Yeah, okay. Same with Joya,” I said. I repeated her own shrugging gesture back to her.
In the wake of this exchange, I felt an understanding between us. The last time our histories had intersected, we’d been standing on the world’s cusp. We all had been. Gotmamas and adoption trackers, boys and girls, black, white, brown, and all colors in between. We’d all been abandoned, lost, or rescued, and therefore of one tribe, although we hadn’t known it. Shar and I had been among the Children of the Edge, too young to feel ourselves teetering. I hadn’t liked Kim, but I was glad to hear that she was well. I’d had no fondness for Karice, and Shar had hated Joya, but it didn’t stop the common ground from rising around us in the here and now. Shar and me? We’d both lost people we loved over the edge, and neither one of us had fallen.
Although, considering that history, I couldn’t help it; my gaze twitched to those outsize pearl earrings. It was a fast look, barely a blink’s worth, but she busted me and laughed.
“Oh, you want to see?”
I did. I couldn’t help it. “Bet your ass,” I said.
She slid the earrings off; they were clip-ons. The fissures were gone, but I could see a faint, neat scar in the center of each lobe, pointing straight down.
“Plastic surgery,” she confided. “They had to excise the old wounds, and that hurt about as much as it sounds like it would. Expensive? Lord, yes. But I saved up and had it done when I was twenty. I never forgot you saying my earlobes looked like old-lady bottoms.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap, rueful. “Well, I was kind of a turd.”
“You and me and every twelve-year-old female ever born. It’s going to be a miracle if Kim doesn’t flat eat her daughter. I’m glad I had boys,” Shar said, still smiling. “I’m sorry about Joya, but at least your other friend landed on her feet.”
It took me a second to realize who she had to mean.