Pretending to Dance

  “Ta-da!” I said, as if it had been nothing.

  “Brava!” he said, then added with a chuckle, “Let’s not ever do that again.”

  “All right,” I agreed. Impulsively I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around him. For a moment, I simply held him tight. I didn’t ever want to lose him.

  3

  Russell’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when I wheeled Daddy into the house.

  “You carried him down the hill?” he asked as I pushed Daddy through the front door into the living room. I knew he didn’t mean that I literally carried him. Russell had a few turns of phrase that were all his own.

  “Of course,” I said, like it had been nothing.

  “Next time, we’ll call you,” Daddy said to Russell.

  “Damn straight you will.” Russell gave me a scolding look, or at least he tried to, but he had these big cocker spaniel eyes the same chocolate brown as his skin, and I’d never seen him able to pull off a convincing angry expression. Anyway, I knew he wasn’t mad. Just worried. He loved my father. He did everything for him. Lifted him out of bed in the morning, bathed him, emptied his urine bag, changed his catheter, dressed him, brushed his teeth. I guessed when someone depended on you as much as my father depended on Russell, you either started loving that person or you ended up hating him. I didn’t see how there could be an in-between.

  “Let’s say hi to Mom,” Daddy said. “Then we can type.”

  “You got him?” Russell asked me, and I nodded. Russell headed down the hall toward his room, which was right next to my parents’ room. He was always close by in case Daddy needed him.

  I pushed Daddy past the broad living room windows that overlooked the mountains in the distance. Uncle Trevor helped my grandfather build our house when my parents got engaged. In my opinion, it was the nicest of the Morrison Ridge houses, with its sky-blue exterior and dozens of windows that overlooked the tree-covered peaks and valleys that stretched on and on forever. It was hypnotizing, that view. When I was younger, I’d sometimes sit on the window seat in the dining room and imagine what it would be like to be an eagle soaring from our house to those mountains. That was before the New Kids on the Block and Johnny Depp entered the scene and my fantasies switched to something a bit more provocative.

  Mom was in the kitchen, chopping onions on a wooden chopping board. She still had on her white pharmacy coat with the embroidered Nora Arnette, PharmD. above the pocket. She was also wearing her harried look. That “I’ve been on my feet all day and now I have to make dinner for my family and a guest and I don’t even have time to take my white coat off” look. My mother always had too much on her mind. If there weren’t a zillion things to do, she would make up stuff that needed doing. It was impossible for her to relax. She was very pretty, but her prettiness had a fragile quality to it, especially when she was tired or rushing to get something done, the way she seemed to be now. She had the sort of blond hair that was so fair, no one would notice when it eventually turned gray. It was shoulder length and she almost always wore it in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were the palest blue; her skin a nearly translucent white, but she had full lips that were so deeply colored she never bothered with lipstick. I knew this because I’d pawed through her makeup bag more than once, trying out the eyeliner and mascara and blush, disappointed that there was nothing to spice up my own pale lips.

  “Does your friend eat everything, do you know?” Mom asked me once I’d pushed Daddy into the room.

  I shrugged. “No clue,” I said. “What are we having?”

  She crossed the room and bent over to give my father a kiss on the lips, holding the knife well out of the way. “Enchiladas,” she said, heading back to the chopping board.

  “Awesome.” I flopped onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Stacy and I are going to sleep in the springhouse tonight.” I looked at my father, who gave a barely perceptible nod in my mother’s direction. “If it’s okay with you,” I added quickly.

  She looked over at me, the knife in her hand hovering above an onion. “Oh, Molly, I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s too far from the house. It’s too isolated and do you have any idea how dark it will be out there in the middle of the night?”

  “The springhouse has lights,” I pointed out.

  “Remember the time you tried to camp out? And that was just in our back—”

  She stopped mid-sentence and I knew my father had given her some kind of warning look to shut her up.

  “I was only twelve then,” I said. “And I was alone. I’ll have Stacy with me this time and it’ll be fine. Daddy’s okay with it.”

  My mother turned to my father, her hand on her hip. “You’re going to make me be the bad guy?” She sounded annoyed.

  “Well, you don’t have to be the bad guy,” Daddy said calmly.

  She frowned, two little lines forming between her eyebrows. “You think the two of them sleeping out there is a good idea?”

  “Maybe not a stupendous idea, but I don’t see a problem with it.” He was teasing her and I could tell by the color in her cheeks that she was very close to shifting from annoyance to anger.

  “Don’t make light of this, Graham,” Mom said, leaning one hip against the black granite countertop. “It’s not just Molly we have to think about. We don’t even know this other girl.”

  “She’s really nice,” I said, as though I knew Stacy better than I did … and as though her niceness had anything to do with us sleeping in the springhouse.

  My mother didn’t seem to hear me. “Maybe we should talk to her parents about it,” she said, giving in a bit. “Get their permission?”

  “You don’t have to make such a major production out of it, Mom,” I said.

  “Molly,” Dad said, “when Stacy’s parents drop her off, let Mom or me talk to them before they leave, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said, getting up. “You ready for me to type?”

  “I think Mom and I might need to perform an opera first,” he said.

  “Oh no.” My mother groaned. “I don’t have time for an opera. We don’t need one. I’m not really mad. I’m over it.”

  “It’s more important than your onions,” he said.

  “Graham. Dinner will be late.”

  “Do we care?” He looked at me where I stood in the doorway, and I obediently shook my head.

  “I’ll be in your office,” I said. I walked out the door to the hallway, but instead of going to my father’s office, I stood against the wall, waiting. Listening.

  “So what shall we sing about?” Daddy asked my mother.

  She gave a resigned sigh. “I don’t care. You pick.”

  “Hm,” he said. “The dishwasher?”

  “Whatever,” Mom said.

  “Ohhh!” my father sang in a booming operatic voice. “The dishwasher! The dishwaaaasher!”

  “The diiiiishwasher!” Mom sang, and then she laughed, and pretty soon they were both singing their two-word nonsensical opera at the top of their lungs, their voices rising and falling with an air of great drama.

  Russell stepped out of his room and looked at me. “Did they have a fight?” he whispered.

  I shook my head. “A minor disagreement.” I smiled.

  He plugged his ears with his fingers, but he was grinning as he walked back into his room. I didn’t budge. I liked listening. I thought I could actually feel my parents’ spirits lifting as I stood there in the hallway, smiling to myself. My father could change the mood of a room, I thought. He could ease sorrow, erase fear, diffuse anger. There were times, and this was one of them, when I thought he was a magician.

  4

  San Diego

  “What do you think of this one?” Aidan asks. “It’s one of my favorites.” He turns his laptop so that I can see the photograph. In the picture, we’re sitting on a beach in Hawaii, Diamond Head in the background, and we look tanned and fit and very, very happy. But the picture won’t work for our portfolio.

  ?
??You’re forgetting the rules,” I say. “No sunglasses. No bathing suits.”

  “Hmm. I forgot.” He straightens the computer on his lap again. We’re sitting side by side on our sectional going through hundreds of photographs, trying to find the right combination for our portfolio. Besides the “no sunglasses and no bathing suits” rules, we’ve been admonished not to show any booze in our pictures. And no baseball caps. What is that about? I have no idea, but Aidan and I have turned into rule followers. We need to maximize our chances at being selected by a birth mother.

  We’d finally completed all the paperwork for the adoption agency two weeks before. They now had copies of our marriage license, our birth certificates, our medical records, our tax returns, and the reference letters written by our friends and employers. We passed our criminal background checks and our physicals. I’d worried about the medical records. Somewhere, sometime, I’m sure I filled out a medical questionnaire that asked if a parent had ever had cancer, and I’m sure I would have said no. How closely would the agency study those records? Would they compare that answer to the tale I told Patti about my mother’s putative breast cancer? I could drive myself crazy worrying about details like that.

  Three weeks have passed since our last visit from Patti and we are only now getting down to business on the portfolio, which will culminate in the writing of a “Dear Expecting Mother” letter we are both dreading. It’s simply been too nerve-racking to work on the portfolio before we knew we had approval from the agency. But the letter arrived yesterday: Congratulations! You’ve been approved to adopt a child through Hope Springs Adoption Agency. You now join Hope Springs’ ninety-two other waiting families. I was deflated by that number. A birth mother has ninety-two other potential placements for her baby. At thirty-eight, are we the oldest? How will that young woman view Aidan’s receding hairline? The laugh lines around my eyes? What expectant mother will consider a couple the age of her own parents to raise her child?

  I look at the photograph on my laptop screen. In it, I’m plucking a lemon from the tree in our backyard. Perfect, I think, until I remember the “no sunglasses” rule. Of course I’m wearing them. You live in San Diego, you wear sunglasses. Maybe we’ll have to stick to indoor pictures.

  “How can we make our portfolio stand out from the others?” I ask Aidan.

  “I think we should make it cute,” he says.

  “Cute?” I laugh. “How exactly do we do that?”

  “We should look at how teen magazines do their layouts and mimic them,” he says, and I can tell he’s been seriously thinking about this. “Maybe some cutesier graphics. A collage of photographs, some on an angle. Vibrant colors, maybe.”

  I turn my head to study him, smiling. He is adorable. Mr. Sunshine. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think we should go with something more serious and heartfelt. I don’t want to come across as frivolous.”

  “We’ll find a balance,” he reassures me. He turns his computer to face me again. “What about this one with the twins?” he asks.

  In the photograph, Aidan and I are on a carousel, each of us standing next to a horse as we hold on to his sister Laurie’s two-year-old twin boys, Kai and Oliver. The agency told us we should be sure to include pictures of us with children, and this one is perfect.

  “Definitely, yes!” I say.

  “Except…” Aidan points to the sunglasses on my face in the photograph.

  “Screw the sunglasses,” I say. “That’s a great picture.”

  Aidan marked the picture to be included in the portfolio. “As long as we’re now following the ‘screw the sunglasses’ rule,” he said, “I think we should put in a bunch of action shots of us. You know, canoeing and skiing and those hiking pictures we have from last fall.”

  “But maybe they’ll make us look too … hedonistic, or too adventurous to be able to fit a baby into our lives. I think we should show us in our house so she can see where her baby will grow up.”

  “Well, how about some of each?” Aidan suggests.

  “I think we need more of us with the twins,” I say.

  Aidan nods. “Laurie says she has a bunch. She’s going to bring them to Mom and Dad’s on Sunday.”

  He clicks to another page on his laptop, this one full of dozens of small images. I know what they are. Pictures from his childhood. Zoe, the social worker at the agency, said to include a few. “Show the happy families you grew up in,” she suggested. Aidan loves the idea, and now I watch him sort through the old pictures. He is so family oriented. Not only did he scan family photographs into his computer, he organized them by year. What other man would do something like that? He treasures his history. I watch him smile as he clicks through the pictures, and I feel a powerful sadness wash over me.

  I have no old family photographs. I’d taken a handful with me when I left home at eighteen, but I threw them away one day when my anger got the better of me.

  I wish old memories could be as easily discarded.

  5

  Morrison Ridge

  “Oh sure, that’s fine,” Stacy’s mother said to Mom through the open window of her silver van. Stacy was already out of the van and standing next to me, her stuffed backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “All right then,” Mom said. “I just thought I should run it by you before we—”

  “I’ve got to scoot!” Stacy’s mother said, the van already rolling. “You girls have fun!” she called through the window.

  I had the distinct impression that Stacy’s mother was more relaxed about things than my mother was. We watched her drive away, then Mom turned to Stacy.

  “I’m Nora,” she said, holding out her hand. When I was younger, my friends were supposed to call her “Miss Nora” and my father “Mr. Graham,” but that changed about a year or so ago. My mother grew up in Pennsylvania and she never really embraced that “Miss So and So” culture of North Carolina, so now everyone was on a first-name basis. I still wasn’t quite used to it.

  “I’m Stacy.” Stacy laughed at the formality as she shook my mother’s hand. She looked different to me than she did at school, although I couldn’t have said what it was exactly. There was still that unbelievably shiny straight black hair that she wore to her shoulders, her thick bangs almost long enough to touch her eyelashes. Her eyes were nearly black and her lashes thick. She had a body the boys at school couldn’t take their eyes off of, and right now her pink tank top and white shorts seemed to show it all off. Even though I was wearing almost the same outfit—my top was blue instead of pink—I felt … not ugly exactly, but really plain and skinny and flat-chested and bespectacled. My hair was an out-of-control mess compared to hers, and I hated the freckles splattered across my nose. I did have one thing going for me, though: those distinctive blue eyes that ran in the Arnette family. The light irises were rimmed in navy blue, almost black. On me, those eyes were practically hidden behind my glasses, but at least I had them. Standing next to Stacy, though, I felt skinny and plain and suddenly wished I hadn’t invited her over, which I knew was really small of me. She couldn’t help how she looked any more than I could.

  “Do you like enchiladas?” Mom asked her as we walked into the house.

  “I love Mexican food!” Stacy said.

  “Excellent,” Mom said. “You girls can make the salad while I finish up the rice.”

  * * *

  I felt awkward with Stacy as we chopped the tomatoes and tore the lettuce. Conversation would have been easy with my other friends, but I didn’t know Stacy well enough to know what to talk about … unless we started talking about the New Kids on the Block, and I didn’t want to get into that with my mother right there, so we were quiet.

  Mom took the enchiladas from the oven and set the pan on a couple of trivets. “Russell!” she called over her shoulder. “Dinner’s ready!”

  We carried everything into the dining room and Stacy and I were already seated when Russell pushed my father into the room and up to the table. Stacy’s face registered surp
rise at the sight of Daddy in a wheelchair. “You must be Stacy.” Daddy smiled at her and she quickly recovered her composure.

  “Yes.” She smiled her pretty smile.

  “I’m Graham,” he said. “And this is Russell.” Daddy and Russell were dressed like twins tonight, both wearing black T-shirts and jeans.

  Russell looked across the table at me from behind my father’s wheelchair. “I’m going to a friend’s for dinner tonight,” he said. “You want to do the honors, Molly?”

  “Sure,” I said, pushing back my chair and getting to my feet. Usually Mom or I fed Daddy dinner, while Russell often took care of breakfast and lunch. Dinner was family time, my mother said, and that was fine with me. I’d mastered feeding myself and my father at the same time. I walked around the table and sat down next to him, turning my chair so that I was half facing him, half facing the table. Stacy was across from us and Mom took the seat at the head of the table. I felt Stacy’s eyes on Daddy and me as I tucked his napkin into his collar.

  “So, how long have you two known each other?” Daddy asked.

  Stacy and I looked at each other. “Just, like, two years,” she said. “My family moved here two years ago from Washington, D.C.”

  “Big change,” Mom said as she lifted a couple of enchiladas onto a plate and handed it to Stacy.

  “Huge change.” Stacy took the plate from her. “Like another planet. But I like it. The kids are nice.” She smiled at me and I felt bad for wishing I hadn’t invited her.

  “Brothers and sisters?” Daddy asked.

  “Two sisters and a brother,” she said. “All older.”

  “Ah,” Daddy said. “Do they spoil you?”

  “Are you kidding?” She laughed. “They torment me!”

  Mom handed me Daddy’s plate, and I used the side of my fork to cut a bite for him.