Free A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger Page B

off, but her father had picked her up and hugged her. “So, my little genius, you’re human,” he had said, kissing her hair. “I’m relieved.”
    She turned over her coffee cup for the waitress to fill. “So how’d that rototiller work out for you?”
    “Like angels singing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus,” said Bertie. “Cuts through the ground like butter.”
    “And straight through the hose,” Rosalee said.
    “Which shouldn’t have been where it was,” he said under his breath, winking at Lucy.
    “Never mind about the rototiller,” Rosalee said, brushing the dark bangs from her wide forehead. “We wanted to talk to you about the adoption. My friend Patty says you should check out any adoption agency with the Department of Consumer Protection. Just make sure everything’s on the up-and-up.”
    “You think I should be worried?” Lucy asked.
    “Patty says some of them give false information about the children: disabilities, wrong birth dates, things like that. It’s just wise to check.”
    “Cokie thinks I should call it off,” Lucy said flatly.
    She felt the discomfort of minor guilt, knowing this pronouncement would bring her parents to her defense. They had no idea she had already picked out the color she would paint Mat’s bedroom, already purchased a Tonka dump truck and a stuffed penguin to place on his bed, already anticipated the way his brown eyes would widen when he saw his own small bathroom decorated with the fish wallpaper she had ordered from a catalog. They clearlythought her toes were in the water, when she had already jumped into the lake.
    “Call it off?” Rosalee said. “Did she really tell you to call it off?”
    “Basically, yes.”
    “That’s just the stress talking,” she said. “The woman is too thin. It’s a little-known fact, but stress is actually absorbed by fat cells. It gets diluted.”
    “On that note,” Bertie said, “I’ll be having the tall stack of pancakes with a side of bacon.”
    When the food arrived and Bertie had tried out all six varieties of syrup, Lucy remembered something she had wanted to ask her mother.
    “Ma, who’s Willard? I showed Nana Mavis a picture of Mat, and she started crying over someone named Willard.”
    Rosalee put down her fork. “To think that she remembers.”
    “Remembers what?”
    “He would have been my brother, but he died before I was born. He was your Gram and Gramps’s firstborn, Mavis’s first grandchild, and she came to see him every day, or so I’ve been told. He died when he was three, and I was born five years later.”
    “Poor Mavis,” Lucy said. “So why is this the first time I’m hearing this?”
    “You know why, Lucy. You cried when Aunt Bonnie threw out her old sewing machine because you couldn’t stand to see it abandoned. Why should you suffer over something that happened long before you were born, before even I was born? And besides, it just never came up. I don’t remember Mavis ever talking about Willard. Gram and Gramps, rest their souls, only mentioned him once a year, on his birthday in April.”
    Lucy took this in. She certainly felt for Mavis, but she wasn’t going to cry about someone who died more than a half century ago. Her mother, evidently, couldn’t separate the sensitive child she had been from the pragmatic adult she had become. She pushedher annoyance aside, given what Harlan had said in his e-mail. She smiled at her mother.
    “Just so you know, I don’t take on everyone’s pain anymore. I’ve reformed.”
    “Of course you do, hon. It’s what makes you special.”
    Lucy shrugged and distributed the whipped cream more evenly across her Belgian waffle. The air in the pancake house suddenly felt too warm, and the waffle tasted too sweet, or maybe she could only learn so much about herself in one morning.

    BACK AT THE DUPLEX, Lucy saw Louis outside her door, arms crossed, sitting in a frayed folding lawn chair that had been left on the tiny front porch when she moved in.