Margaret barely heard him.
“Your surname wasn’t Barlow.”
“No.”
“You were Claire Porter.”
Claire’s face crumpled.
“My name was Claire Porter before I was adopted.”
Margaret sat down.
Not because anyone invited her.
Because her knees would not hold.
The chair beneath her was the same oak chair Daniel had sat in as a boy while doing multiplication homework.
For nearly thirty-five years, it had been pulled in and out from that table by children, grandchildren, neighbors, Christmas guests.
Now Margaret placed both palms flat against the wood.
“Say it again.”
Claire’s eyes filled.
“My name was Claire Porter.”
Margaret looked at the woman she had known for fourteen years.
Daniel’s wife.
The mother of her grandchildren.
The person who corrected Margaret’s seasoning, complained about her newspapers on the dining table, reminded Daniel to pick up prescriptions, bought Margaret orthopedic slippers one Christmas and made her cry the next.
Margaret searched her face.
She tried to find the seven-year-old girl she remembered.
The child had been small for her age.
Dark curls that frizzed near the temples.
A gap between her front teeth.
A habit of folding napkins into triangles when she was nervous.
She hated peas.
Loved strawberry jam.
And would only eat scrambled eggs from one particular blue plate.
Margaret looked at Claire’s hands.
The left thumb rubbed twice across the plate’s rim.
Then twice again.
A nervous rhythm.
Margaret covered her mouth.
“Oh, Lord.”
Daniel stepped forward.
“Mama?”
Margaret lowered her hand.
“When were you born?”
Claire answered immediately.
“March twelfth, 1978.”
