Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [133]
“Homework,” I said, and she ran to her room. The nursery had been all pale pink and green when she’d been a baby, before her true nature had revealed itself. Rory wasn’t a pink-bedroom girl, although, like all her peers, she’d undergone a brief but fervent infatuation with the Disney princesses. Now her space was outfitted with an oversize desk that held footlong plastic bins in which Rory stored her Legos, her snap circuit kit, the collection of old cell phones and calculators she’d taken apart, and plastic bins full of laboriously printed and drawn plans labeled EXPERIMINTS AND INVENSHUNS.
We still lived in the apartment in the San Giacomo, but I’d sold the bottom floor, which meant we’d been reduced—quote-unquote—to just four bedrooms: one for me, one for Rory, and two guest suites with their own bathrooms for whoever came to stay, Bettina and Darren, Annie and Frank and their boys. I’d given a lot of the art away to museums and let go of most of the staff, although I still had someone to clean, and to cook when I entertained. I’d gone back to work part-time, and I volunteered at Rory’s school, organizing fund-raising events and the annual Book and Bake Sale, raising money for the new library and the class trips to Portugual and Spain that Rory would take as an eighth-grader. I’d even made two friends, other mothers with kids in Rory’s class, one married, one single. I’d thought about dating, but hadn’t yet. Secretly, I suspected that that part of my life was over. I’d had my big love, and now, at forty-eight (although my friends told me I didn’t look a day over forty), I had memories, friends, a weird kind of family, and a daughter I loved with all my heart . . . and, surely, there were worse things than that.
Rory came dashing back into the room in her favorite sparkly T-shirt (white, long-sleeved, with a sequined heart on the chest) and a pair of navy-blue Columbia sweatpants that Kimmie had given her. We sat in the kitchen, the room where Rory and I spent most of our time together. I’d moved one of the Persian rugs from the apartment I’d sold into one of the kitchen’s corners and bought a round table and four chairs, and moved my laptop from the desk in the dressing room onto the kitchen counter. Rory would do her homework at one end of the table; I’d sit, with my laptop, at the opposite end, where I would look up recipes or send out notices about fund-raisers and committee meetings, and e-mail pictures to Annie.
Rory smoothed the page on the table. She’d written her name in big capital letters in the center of the tree trunk.
“You know the story, right?”
She gave a theatrical sigh—I wasn’t sure who she’d picked that up from—and then began. “Once upon a time there was a mommy with no baby, and she wanted a baby more than anything else in the world.”
“Right you are.” This was a bit of revisionist history, but Annie was the one who’d come up with this story, the mythology of Rory’s essential beginnings, and I’d never tried to change it.
“So the mommy and the daddy found a lady to give them a seed that would become a baby, and that lady was Jules. Then the seed got planted in another lady, and that lady was my tummy mommy, and that lady was Annie.” She peered at her paper. “Where do I put ‘tummy mommy’?”
“Hmm. Why don’t we write her right next to the tree trunk.” I tapped the paper. Rory frowned. She believed in rules and could be inflexible when it came to doing things the right way, but she let me help her write “Annie” just above her own name. I wondered again why the teachers had made this assignment, why they’d sent the kids home with a family tree with spaces for mother and father but no room for alternate configurations, when, in addition to the twins-by-surrogate, at least two kids in Rory