Free The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow Page A

for being cranky. Truth is, she’s just being straightforwardly Karla. She needs her coffee. She needs her sleep. She needs them to quiet down.
    There’s another factor at work, too. Not long into the weekend, a part of her is absolutely ready to go home to see her kids. That’s always been an issue for her at these reunions. In the days before cell phones, the girls remember her standing at pay phones outside bars or restaurants, calling home to her kids. Kelly would have to nudge her along: “Come on, Karla, enough! Get off already.”
    “We’re all moms who completely love our kids,” Kelly says. “But Karla, wow, she really loves her kids.”
    Karla isn’t one of those mothers who spoils her children or gets overly involved in their lives. It’s just that her love translates into an urge to spend total time with them. For years now, on Saturday nights, she has never felt compelled to go out for dinner and drinks with her husband and some other couple. “I’d rather spend Saturday nights with my family,” she says. The other girls understand this about her, even if it makes Karla a wet blanket.
    Here at Angela’s, the girls discussed drawing straws to see who slept where and who’d share a bed with whom. But even before partners were chosen, Kelly agreed to sleep in the downstairs bedroom with cranky Karla. “I’m the only one brave enough to stay with you,” she says. Karla smiles slightly and doesn’t argue the point.
    Throughout the weekend, there are flashes of the bubbly, funny Karla they knew when they were kids. But there are times, also, when she’s obviously subdued or a bit disconnected.
    Kelly thinks everyone is giving Karla a little more room to be cranky. “She wants quiet, we’re quiet,” says Kelly. “She wants to sleep, we try to let her sleep.” The girls have been doing this for a few years now, a slight indulgence—actually, an act of love—that has become an unspoken agreement.
    Karla dismisses this. “That’s Kelly,” she says. “She thinks she knows . . .”
    Whatever the case, Karla is tremendously grateful to all of the girls. Her intermittent crankiness aside, she is well aware that they have been in her corner when she needed them the most. Through the hardest moments of her life, their devotion to her has been tested, and they all came through. That’s why, though she’d like to go to bed, and she’d like them to shut up already, and a part of her would like to get home to be with her kids, she’s here, on the porch, with them.
     
     
    L ike Marilyn, Karla was born into circumstances that set her apart from the other Ames girls. Marilyn was a baby who was desperately wanted; after all, her father had reversed his vasectomy to have her. In a way, Karla’s arrival in the world was the mirror opposite of Marilyn’s.
    She was born on April 25, 1963—just seventeen days after Marilyn and nine days after Jenny—in the same maternity ward at Mary Greeley Hospital. For the five days that followed, Karla was brought to her mother’s side for every feeding. Her mother held her, nursed her and talked to her. And then, on the sixth day, her mother gave her up for adoption and disappeared from her life.
    Now, as a mother herself, Karla finds it almost unfathomable that a woman could nurse and hold a child through all those feedings, and then walk away. That image of abandonment would remain with Karla, informing the woman she became. Decades later, with her own kids, she became a mother who was willing to sleep by their bedside when they were sick, to hold their hands for as long as they needed her, to skip Saturday nights out to be with them.
    Growing up, the Ames girls were always intrigued by the story of Karla’s birth. They didn’t dwell on it, but it was there, in the back of their minds.
    As teens, seven of the girls, including Karla, worked together at Boyd’s Dairy Store. One day a woman came in for ice cream. She stared at Karla, almost as if she knew her.