“He doesn’t want either of you.”
Dorothy believed her.
“What did he say?”
“That he wants nothing to do with this.”
Dorothy wrote letters anyway.
She gave them to her mother to mail.
Every afternoon, she asked whether anything had arrived in return.
Nothing ever did.
Then her mother began leaving adoption information beside her breakfast.
“I’m keeping my baby,” Dorothy told her.
“And where are you going to live?”
“Here.”
“Who pays the bills?”
“I’ll work.”
“Who watches the baby while you finish school?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Not in my house.”
Dorothy resisted for as long as she could.
But she was sixteen.
No money.
No home of her own.
No support.
And she believed the baby’s father had rejected both of them.
When her son was born, Dorothy held him.
He curled his fingers around hers.
She remembered the crease above his nose.
The dark hair flattened against his head.
When he opened his mouth, she expected him to cry.
He yawned instead.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“I’m your mom.”
The adoptive mother waited beside the bed.
“May I?”
“Just another minute.”
Dorothy’s mother reached for her.
“You signed.”
Eventually, Dorothy lifted her baby toward the woman.
His tiny fingers caught her hospital gown.
She had to loosen them herself.
One finger at a time.
Years passed.
Dorothy grew up.
Found work.
Got her own apartment.
Stopped answering her mother’s calls.
But every year on her son’s birthday, she counted.
Five.
Eight.
Ten.
She wondered whether he hated peas.
Whether somebody checked his forehead when he was sick.
Whether he knew he was adopted.
Whether he ever wondered about her.
Then, ten years after her mother took her away, Dorothy heard someone call her name in a grocery store.
She turned.
And there I was.
The boy she’d loved.
Older.
Standing beside a grocery cart.
“Do you have time for coffee?” I’d asked.
I remembered that day.
What I didn’t know was what Dorothy had believed about me.
She’d thought I knew about the baby.
I thought our teenage relationship had simply been destroyed by her mother moving her away.
Neither of us understood that we’d been living inside two different versions of the same past.
Coffee became dinner.
Dinner became another date.
One night, I apologized.
