Part 3 — Two Mothers One Garden
Sheree held the photograph out with both hands. It was a baby in a pink blanket on the steps of a hospital in Portland, Maine, and holding her was a girl of twenty-two with a tired, frightened smile. Sheree turned it over for Erin to read the back, which said only: June 4th. I love you. “I am your birth mother,” she said, so quietly that the microphone barely caught it. “I signed the papers thirty years ago. I have wanted to meet you every day since.”
The whole garden stopped. I stood in the aisle in my blue dress, and the strangest thing happened. I was not afraid. Erin was adopted, and we had always known, and I had told her at the age of seven, on the porch, with a picture book. I had prayed for the girl who gave her to us ever since, whoever she was. The shock was not Sheree. The shock was that my husband had known for years, and had put her in my chair.
Howard sat down heavily on a folding chair. He looked like a man who had been holding a door shut with his back, and the door had finally opened. He told us all of it, in front of a hundred guests. The agency had kept his work address on file, and every year on the fourth of June a letter from Sheree had been forwarded to him. He had read every one. He had never shown one to me.
“I was afraid,” he said. “I was afraid Erin would want to leave us, and afraid you would think I had been keeping a secret. And I was keeping one. In January she walked into the hardware store, and I could not make myself say a word. I told her I would introduce her at the wedding. I put her in the front row because I wanted her to see it. I did not know how to tell you, Peg. So I called her my coworker.”
I did not shout, because I was at the wedding of my daughter. I said, “Howard, you could have told me in a quiet kitchen, any night in the last ten years, and I would have said, Of course. Let her know she is welcome.” My voice shook, and I let it. “What you cannot do is take the wedding of my daughter away from me and give me a chair behind a tent pole.” He put his face in his hands.
Erin did something I will remember until I die. She walked down off the little stage, took the hand of Sheree in her left and mine in her right, and raised the microphone with the hand of her husband. “I have a mother who raised me,” she said, “and a woman who gave me life. I did not know I had both until about five minutes ago. Today, for the first time, I have both in one garden. I would like them to sit together.”
Sheree unpinned my corsage from her wrist with trembling fingers. “This is yours,” she said. “I am so sorry. I did not know he had done this.” I fastened it on my own dress, and then I looked across the lawn and caught the eye of the florist, a woman with gray braids who had been listening from behind the cake table. She was already coming, holding a small sprig of white hydrangea tied with ribbon. “I made a spare,” she said. “Just in case.”
I pinned it on Sheree myself. We did not speak of anything large. She told me she had worked in a bakery for twenty years, and I said that I had been a church secretary, which was almost the same, because both of us spent our lives making sure other people were fed. She laughed, and the laugh was the laugh of Erin, which I had heard every day of my life.
Ardith, the sister of Howard, came to me by the shed. Her face was pink. “It was only a chair,” she said, “and I told you not to spoil the day. I was wrong, Peggy. It was never about a chair.” I told her I knew. I squeezed her hand and left it at that. Some apologies need no more than that.
A family is not a closed circle, but a table that can always be set with one more place.
Howard stood again before the guests dispersed. He gave a short, plain apology, without excuses, to Erin, to Sheree, and to me. He offered to refund the florist for the change in the order, and he moved into the guest room that night, without being asked. He saw a counselor twice a week through the fall. I did not forgive him in a day. I watched him, and over time I saw a man who had been afraid for thirty years finally learn to say so.
At the dance, the DJ called for the father and daughter, and Erin shook her head and asked for the mothers instead. Two women in blue and green walked onto the grass in the last of the light and took the hands of the bride. We were not graceful. We stepped on the toes of one another, and laughed, and cried a little at the same time, while the hydrangeas along the fence shook in the breeze.
The next Sunday Sheree came to the house for coffee. I set three cups on the porch rail, beside the hydrangeas I had planted two years early for this day. Erin arrived in the old sweatshirt of her husband, still glowing, and sat on the steps between us. Nobody said much. A robin hopped across the lawn, and I thought, quite calmly, that I had once feared the day this woman would appear, and that it was one of the best days of my life.