“For how long?”
“Almost six years.”
Six years.
I’d known my mother all my life, and somehow there had been an entire child in her life I’d never known about.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Mom seemed lost in thought and didn’t answer. Helen was watching her.
“Mom talked about you.”
Mom closed her eyes.
“Don’t.”
“She did.”
“Please.”
“I think you need to hear this.”
Helen reached into the box again.
This time she took out another photograph.
Mom holding a newborn baby. I recognized the yellow blanket immediately.
I’d seen that picture in our family album.
“That’s me,” I said.
Helen looked at me.
“I know.”
Something about the way she said it made my stomach tighten.
She turned the photograph over. There were two different kinds of handwriting on the back.
One was Mom’s.
“Amani. Six days old.”
Underneath it, in faded blue ink, someone else had written, “The baby Margaret needed more than me.”
Mom’s knees nearly gave out.
I caught her arm.
“No.”
Helen looked startled.
Mom took the photograph.
“No, no, no.”
“Mom?”
“That’s not what it meant.”
She pressed the picture against her chest. “That’s never what it meant.”
Helen pulled a chair from behind the service counter.
Mom sat.
People were still shopping around us. Carts rattled past. Registers beeped.
The manager quietly offered us his office.
Mom shook her head.
“No. Please. I need to hear this now.”
But register six had become its own little world.
Mom stared at the photograph.
“When I got pregnant with you, it was difficult,” she told me.
“I was sick all the time. Your father was working two jobs. We were behind on everything.”
She looked at Helen.
“Anna’s father, Robert, offered to take her for the summer. I said no.”
Then her face crumpled.
“Until one night.”
She had been exhausted.
Anna needed new shoes. The refrigerator had stopped working. Mom had spent the afternoon being sick.
After Anna went to bed, Mom cried in the kitchen.
“I told your father I was scared I couldn’t manage everything once the baby came.”
She looked at me.
“Then I said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to manage both of them.'”
Helen inhaled sharply.
“Mom heard you.”
Margaret looked at her.
“What?”
“She told me that.”
Mom went still.
Helen sat beside her. “She thought you meant her and the baby.”
Mom covered her mouth.
The next morning, 12-year-old Anna announced that she wanted to live with her father.
Mom argued.
Anna insisted.
“I thought she wanted him,” Mom whispered. “I thought maybe she’d reached the age where an aunt wasn’t enough anymore.”
Helen shook her head.
