She has a grandmother.
She is going to love her.
She is going to love her more than me, because she’s real, because she has my daughter’s father’s mouth and my daughter’s mother’s hands, and because I am the woman who got her by a form in a county office.
It is the most shameful thing I have ever thought, and I thought it with great clarity.
Andre came straight from work, in his reflective vest and steel-toed boots, and sat down beside me, and took my hand without a word.
“I know,” he said.
“I don’t want to be this person.”
“You’re not this person. You’re a person who’s afraid.” He turned my wrist over and kissed the inside of it. “Tav, listen. She’s seventy-seven. She’s been grieving for seven years. She’s not here to take anything. She’s here because somebody finally opened the door.”
“What if she wants her?”
“Then she’ll have to want her next to us,” said my husband, “because we’re not going anywhere either.”
Waverly Linwood arrived at twenty past four.
She was small. I had expected somebody tall, I do not know why. She was a small, upright woman in a navy raincoat, with silver hair pinned flat and a handbag held in both hands in front of her like a shield, and she stopped in the library doorway and did not come any farther.
