The young woman’s eyes filled with tears as she nodded. “Yeah.” Her voice was the palest green of the first spring grass.
Kate pressed her fingers to her upper lip. Then she said the only thing she could think of, the sentence she couldn’t keep back.
“Happy birthday.”
Chapter Two
Sunday, May 11, 2014
8 p.m.
Okay, Pree was freaked. This wasn’t the way Pree had imagined it would go at all. You’d think that a bio mom, confronted with her kid, would faint, or scream, or burst into tears. Something dramatic and loud. But no. Instead, Kate Monroe gave Pree a swift, bone-jarring hug. Then she guided Pree to the back door of the gallery.
“What are we doing?” said Pree, startled by Kate’s sudden motion.
“Getting the hell out of here.”
“What about your show?”
Kate said, “What show?”
Pree stared at the red sign hanging from the bar across the door. “I think that sets the alarm off or something if we open that.”
“Oh,” said Kate. “It’s probably turned off.” She pushed. An earsplitting siren went off, as if an air raid were imminent. “Shit! Run!”
Pree followed on Kate’s heels, down an alley, turning right onto Market. They were near the Castro, and rainbow flags snapped overhead in the light spring wind as they ran. Neon signs blinked in windows—CASH FOR GOLD! Closing 4ever. Sale Sale Sale!—and the tang of urine was sharp and acidic. The alarm, so loud behind them, fell quiet as the noise of the city took over. A tiny Smart car laid on the horn as a bicyclist cut in front of it, and the packed F train rumbled past, making the grate in the sidewalk rattle.
And Pree could only think, My biological mother’s voice is red.
At Church Street, Kate slowed. She breathed as heavily as Pree did, and her smile, though wide, was still startled. “Coffee?”
“Sure.” Pree didn’t care. It was enough to be here now. Looking at her. Kate had recognized her. Kind of. Maybe. Her hands were sweating.
“I guess you’re old enough to drink . . .” Kate’s voice trailed off.
“I’m twenty-two,” said Pree. Didn’t she know that?
Kate bit her lip. Pree took pity on her. “I never say no to coffee, though.”
Kate’s relief was obvious. “Good, good. This is a great place.” She pushed open the café’s door. “I mean, really good coffee. Just great.” Pree was glad it was Kate doing the babbling, not her.
Kate ordered an americano. Pree would normally have ordered the same thing, but it felt strange somehow, so she asked for a mocha, ignoring the fact that she wasn’t the biggest chocolate fan.
“Mocha, great. Good, good,” said Kate. “Will you choose a table for us? I mean, do you mind?”
Pree dug in the front of her backpack for the twenty she’d stashed in the pocket.
“No,” said Kate, too quickly. “I’ve got it.”
“I have money.”
“Please. Let me buy this.”
Kate’s voice sounded darker red now. Almost burgundy. She meant it. It was important to this woman who Pree was related to by half her DNA to buy her a dang coffee. Fine.
That was fine. Hell, maybe that was better than fine. A tremor ran up Pree’s spine, a wonderful fear.
Pree chose a table right in front. She could run if she had to. Maybe she’d spend all night running: first to Kate, then with her, and finally away from her. Who knew? The muscles in her quads and her calves tensed. As Kate pulled out the chair opposite her, Pree felt so nervous she thought she might throw up.
“Here. Your mocha. I’ll be right back. Oh, damn. Hang on.” Kate darted back to the counter, where she picked up a plate the barista had just put up on the bar.
On it was one single piece of chocolate cake.
Pree closed her eyes and held her breath. Maybe if she kept them closed for a minute, she could figure out what this was supposed to be and what she was supposed to do about it.
“This is stupid, isn’t it?” Back at the table, Kate set the cake down in front of Pree. “I thought for a minute it would be cute. When I ordered it.” She pressed the backs of her hands to her cheeks. “But I got it wrong, didn’t I?”
“It’s nice,” Pree managed, her voice a croak.
“It’s creepy.”
Pree didn’t think that was the right word for it. Birthdays were for cake, after all. It was kind of . . . sweet. If a woman gives you up for adoption, and is then tracked down in the wild, wasn’t it natural that she should know, just like that, that it was your birthday? Wasn’t that something a woman doesn’t forget? Did the date ring in her mind like a bell? Had Kate woken up this morning thinking about her? Or did she realize it later, when she looked at her cell phone, noticing the date?
And even though it was chocolate, Pree said, “It’s fine. I like cake.” She watched Kate fiddle with a packet of sugar. My biological mother’s hands are as small as mine. In grade school, Pree’s best friend, Mysti, had smashed their hands together almost daily, laughing at Pree’s tiny fingers. “Short!” Mysti would squeal. “So stumpy! How do you hold a pencil with those teensy things?” Pree had been stupidly embarrassed by this small detail of herself, something she couldn’t change no matter how many hand stretches she did, and even now she favored smocks or dresses with pockets so she could hide her hands as she walked.
Kate smiled at her and then glanced away, as if it had taken all her courage to smile directly at her. Pree got it. She totally got it.
“It’s okay if we’re both not sure what to do here,” said Pree, picking up the fork Kate had set in front of her.
“Oh, crap. I’m the one who’s supposed to say that, right?”
“Why?” Pree didn’t expect Kate to start mothering now. That was fine. That wasn’t what this was about.
Kate’s gaze fell and she took a quick sip of her coffee. “Yeah.”
In the front of the café, a short woman with a buzz cut took a seat on a low stool and started strumming a guitar that looked like it had been through a war. A hole was punched in the front of it, and the neck had been repaired badly with duct tape. The parts of it that were still whole were covered with band stickers. Pree recognized a few of the names from shows she’d been to in LA: Tar and Creosote, Chablis, Female Trouble. If she played the guitar, she’d cover hers in stickers, too. A different kind of sticker maybe—the kind she drew herself and filled her backpack with, the kind she was proud of. It was a good thing, to cover up something you loved with something else equally important.
Kate cleared her throat. “So anyway. Since I’m totally clueless about how to do this, and since I’ve already screwed it up, I’ll just go whole hog and ask you how your birthday was.”
Not how her life was. Just her birthday. Good, that was probably the best place to start. “Fine. I guess. I slept in.”
Kate’s eyes widened. “Here? I mean, in the Bay Area?”
“Yeah. I live here.”
“Oh, my god.”
Pree nodded. Now wasn’t the time to admit that she’d taken the job a year before because she knew where Kate lived. That revelation, if it came, would be for later.
“Where?”
“In the Mission,” said Pree. “Just off Sixteenth at Athol.”
“San Francisco,” said Kate softly. “You live here.”
“And you live in Oakland.” It felt bold to say it. It was an admission of something bigger.
“Yes.” Kate’s small fingers went white around her mug. “You googled me, I’m guessing?”
“Yep,” said Pree simply. There was so much on the Internet, so much more than just Kate’s city of residence.
Nodding, Kate looked at the guitarist. “She’s good.”
Instead of playing standard café fare folk or jazz, the woman was playing a classical piece. The guitar sounded rich, despite the way it looked, and the song was difficult and intricate.
“There are so many questions you must have,�
� said Kate. “And I have . . . Oh, god. I don’t know how to play this game.”
“Rules, then,” said Pree, proud that she’d thought of this.
“What?”
“Let’s make up some rules for the game.”
Kate smiled, the right corner of her mouth crinkling upward. “I’m not so great at games.”
“Let’s give it a shot.”
“Okay, then. Rules.”
Pree thought, pressing the fork against the top of the chocolate buttercream frosting. The little lines it left behind were straight and pleasing. “Three questions each. Nothing off-limits. If, after each of us has answered three questions, either of us is done, it’s fine. No hard feelings. No big deal.” She said the words lightly, but she knew if Kate left after Pree answered a question wrong, Pree would end up curled in a ball on the floor of the café, beyond devastated, making people step over her as they reached for packets of sugars and coffee stirrers.
“Like a speed date,” said Kate.
Pree nodded. Yeah. The most important speed date in the whole world.
Kate said, “You first. Anything.”
Now that the opportunity she’d been waiting for her whole life, literally, was in front of her, Pree’s mind went completely blank. “No, you go ahead.”
“Okay. What’s your name?”
Pree’s jaw dropped open, and she knew she must be showing off some of the cake she’d just finished chewing, but she couldn’t help it. “You don’t even know my name?”
“I let your parents choose.”
“They don’t tell you in the hospital?”
“They hadn’t decided. Your hospital band said ‘Jane’ that first day because they wanted to take some time with you before making a decision. They wanted to get to know you. And they got to fill out the new birth certificate.”
That sounded like her moms. “My name is Pree. I mean, that’s actually short for Peresandra. But I go by Pree.”
“Pree.” Kate sat back, her arms slack at her sides. “I like that. What does it mean? No, wait. I don’t want that to be my second question . . .”
Pree felt the words jumbled up inside her mouth and couldn’t get them out fast enough. “No, no, they’re our rules. Let’s say that one doesn’t count. My moms met in a tiny town in Peresandra, India. Marta’s car hit Isi’s, and then Marta gave Isi a ride, and Isi just kind of never got out of the car.” Pree felt warmed, hearing her mothers’ names. “That’s what Marta says, anyway. So when I was born”—to the woman sitting right across from her—“they chose the town’s name for me, even though the only thing in the town was a tire shop and some huts and a bank that had closed years before. Isi shortened it when I was little to Pretty, but I couldn’t even say that—the closest I could come was Pree. It stuck.”
“I love it.”
Oh. That was unexpected. But it was okay that Kate loved it. What did it hurt? “All right, my turn.”
“Shoot.”
Think of a question. A thousand questions flashed through Pree’s mind, and now the hard part was to narrow them down to one. To start.
“Why did you give me away?” It was obvious. Too easy. Way too early. And even so, she couldn’t stop herself from asking it first, giving it the weight she hadn’t meant to let it have.
“Oh, Pree.” It sounded like Kate was testing the shape of her name. “I was so young. I was only barely sixteen. I was in high school, and my mother— I couldn’t have kept a baby, but I didn’t want to have an abortion. It was the only answer I had.”
Pree could understand that. She honestly could. When she’d been in high school, the same Mysti that had teased her about her small fingers had gotten pregnant at seventeen. Pree had gone with her to the abortion clinic. There was no way Mysti could have kept both the baby and her scholarship to UCLA. It was either abortion or adoption, and Mysti didn’t want to go through her senior year with a belly that she couldn’t wrangle behind the steering wheel of her Mini Cooper. Pree had understood the reasoning completely. It hadn’t made sense for Mysti to keep the baby.
It was an adequate answer. Pree knew there had to be more to it than that, but it was all right for now. “Okay. Moving on. Next question.” God, there were so many. How did she pick the most important one out of the air? Who is my father? What is he like? Did he ever know about me? What happened to my brother? Did you ever look for me? They’d said nothing was off-limits, but suddenly Pree understood that they hadn’t meant it. Neither of them.
Kate leaned forward. “Can I just add something to our rules?”
Pree curled her fingernails into her palms.
“We have time,” Kate said.
“What?”
“I mean, I have time if you do. You live here. I live across the bay.” Her voice trembled underneath the vowels. “We don’t have to ask all the questions, all the big ones, right now. There’s time. If you want there to be.”
She did. Oh, she did want time. Pree felt her stomach flip in abject relief. “Yes. Time.”
The taut skin at Kate’s temples relaxed, and her smile reached her eyes. “So I’m just going to ask a small question, then. Um. What’s your favorite flower?”
It was too easy. And it felt good. “The California poppy.”
Kate’s smile spread into a grin. “That’s amazing.”
“Why?”
“It’s my favorite, too.”
A small silence fell. They both took a bite of the cake, which wasn’t that bad, for chocolate. Pree felt the space between her shoulder blades relax.
Then Kate said, “One more?”
“Okay.”
“How did you find me?”
How could she not know? Wasn’t it obvious? “That database. The one you put your info into. I checked when I was eighteen, and you weren’t there. When I checked again, you were.”
Kate said, “I thought keeping the adoption closed would give you the ability to belong to your family. Completely. Without my selfish wishes ever getting in the way. It was supposed to protect both you and me.”
“Then why did you . . . ?”
“Add my info to that site?” Kate grimaced. “I have to admit, that was a bad night. I was drunk.”
It was a gut punch, a fist to Pree’s hopes. “Oh,” said Pree. “Is that how you got knocked up in the first place?”
“Look.” Kate shook her head, hard. “When I say I was drunk, I mean I was in a very bad place. The lowest I’d ever been. I’d lost everything that mattered to me, and I was never going to have those things back. They weren’t mine anymore. And god, I want you to understand this.” She leaned forward again.
“Yeah?” Pree kept her face as still as possible.
“I’d always said that I wouldn’t put my information out there, that I wouldn’t let you find me. You deserved better. But when I was at the bottom, I did it. I clicked, and suddenly I was just doing it. Typing. I signed up. The next morning, I wouldn’t admit to myself that I’d done it. Kind of like a . . .”
“A one-night stand?”
Kate looked surprised. But she nodded. “Like something you do that you don’t want to admit to yourself. I never consciously thought about it. If someone had asked me if I’d done it, I would have said no with a clear conscience because I believed I hadn’t.”
“I don’t get it.” Pree pulled her backpack up off the floor and held it on her lap under the table. She could run if she had to, she could get the hell out . . .
“In my mind, there was the slimmest chance that you’d want to see if you could find me. Maybe you would register with the site, just to check. And you’d probably live in New Mexico or someplace, and you’d write me an angry letter that would devastate me and I’d cry for six weeks straight, and then finally we’d meet.”
Pree felt her grip on her backpack slip in spite of herself. “In an IHOP, probably.”
Kate blinked. “Yes,” she said. “On some lonely highway. We’d order pancakes and use every kind of syrup on the table. And
you’d hate me.”
“You’d think my hair was funny.”
“I’d never think your hair was funny.”
“But sometimes it is.” Pree tugged on a messy blue lock that hung annoyingly in her eyes.
Kate leaned back in her chair and rubbed her neck. Pree realized she wanted to do the same thing, make the same exact motion, in the same way.
And there it was. Pree felt a wild rush go to her head, a dizziness as if there had been an earthquake, as if the ground had lurched beneath her. Kate was her birth mother. Kate was smiling at her, at Pree.
The birthday cake tasted like joy.
Chapter Three
Sunday, May 11, 2014
10 p.m.
Nolan had seen her today. He was sure of it. Wasn’t that something? Seeing her again. Just like that. Out of nowhere.
It was only because they’d been working at that end of Highway 13 on the Thornhill off-ramp that he’d noticed her at all. He’d always hated the way that exit came to a sudden and curved stop on a downhill. Kate had never cared—she’d come swooping off the freeway, pumping the brakes at the end, hard and fast. Nolan was the opposite. He’d start braking before he even hit the exit, and he’d leave plenty of room between his car and the one in front of him. Then he’d sit with his shoulders knotted up as he watched in the rearview mirror, waiting for the car that would be there any moment, unable to slow, ready to smash into his rear bumper and shatter his world.
It didn’t happen like that.
Nolan opened a beer and took it back to the couch. He sat with a long sigh, as if it had been a treacherous journey from the kitchen to the sofa. It was barely seven steps. The studio apartment was just one main room, a bathroom he could barely turn around in, and a kitchen so tiny he had to use a dorm fridge. The couch was his bed, and when he woke in the mornings, he folded his two quilts and laid them along the back of it.
At least it was easy to keep tidy. Small, like his life now. In his previous life, he’d worked at the office all day and come home to Hurricane Kate, who was always sprouting paintbrushes from her pockets, streaks of gesso on her elbows, red and orange paint caught in her hair. He’d called her the Pig-Pen of Oil Painting. Now his life was reversed: chaos, dirt, and noise all day, then home to peace and quiet. Even his dog, Fred Weasley, was normally quiet and tidy. Big and shaggy-looking, the orange-colored Fred seemed like he would shed, but he didn’t. He liked to lie around snoring softly until Nolan took him for his walk, during which he frolicked like a puppy; then, at home, he went back to whuffling in his sleep. As if he knew Nolan was thinking about him, Fred Weasley opened one large eye, fixed him with a look, and rolled over, his tail thumping twice. He’d had his dinner and a walk. Fred didn’t need anything else.
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