“Oh, okay. Good.” Her wife’s face muscles relax. They’ve both been on edge since the miscarriage. They’ve spent eighteen months and tens of thousands of dollars only to watch their dream of a family repeatedly slip through their fingers. Neither of them can handle any more bad news at the moment.
“I’ll be out in a sec.” Tina disappears back into a cloud of steam.
Angela wanders over to the couch and flops down in her spot at the end of the three-seater. Their black cat, Grizzly, slinks around the corner of the coffee table. He’s the size of a large raccoon, but nimbly hops up into her lap.
“Hey, Grizz.” Angela stokes his glossy fur in an absent sort of way as the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong harmonizing waft from the record player on the sideboard.
She picks up the envelope and slips the edge of it back and forth through her fingers, thinking. On the bus back from work she started having misgivings about opening the envelope and removing it from the shop. Which is silly, of course. It didn’t belong to the shop to begin with. And no, perhaps she shouldn’t have opened it, but it had been posted so long ago, and was clearly forgotten. Was she not doing the intended addressee, Nancy Mitchell, a service by opening it? If she hadn’t, it might never have been discovered at all, and this woman would never know that she was adopted. Angela sets the envelope down on the couch cushion beside her and picks up her wine glass with the other. She takes a sip and grimaces. It’s the fake wine she’s been drinking out of desperation since they first started their fertility journey. Her wife emerges from the kitchen, holding a glass of her own.
“I figured after last night, you might want to revert to the fake stuff,” Tina says, indicating Angela’s glass.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“How is it, anyway? Is it basically just grape juice?”
Angela stares into the red depths, considering. “It’s more like wine than grape juice, but more like vinegar than wine.”
Tina chuckles and settles herself down on the other end of the couch. Both women turn their bodies inward to face each other, knees tented in front of them, the toes of their matching slippers touching.
“How was your day?” Angela asks, stalling.
Tina takes a sip of her real merlot. Angela catches a whiff of it and her stomach churns. “Fine. Uneventful. Did some cleaning, got groceries. Prepped for lectures tomorrow. How was the store? Usual sleepy Sunday?”
Angela looks down into her glass, swills it in her hand like a gold prospector, hoping the right words will float to the surface. “Not quite.”
“Do tell.”
Angela isn’t sure how to begin, so she opts for fessing up. “I found a piece of mail that must have gone astray at some point, was never delivered to the person it was addressed to. The weird thing is, it was addressed to the shop. Well,” she corrects herself, “the address of the shop. But it was meant for someone named Nancy Mitchell.”
“Is that it?” Tina asks, pointing down at the envelope between them. “You opened it?”
“Yeah. I know. I feel weird about it. But the postmark said it was mailed in 2010 and it was buried in a box inside a drawer that no one’s opened for years. Aunt Jo never bothered to organize that place. It was never going to be found.”
“So what’s in it?”
Angela gives her wife a meaningful look over the top of her knees. “It’s a huge letter. It’s not long, but I mean the contents. It’s… heartbreaking.”
“What’s in it?” Tina asks again.
Angela removes the letter and the accompanying note from the envelope. She passes them to Tina, then reaches for her wine glass, taking another sip as Ella and Louis begin the chorus of “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” A few seconds later, Angela hears the hiss of water on the stovetop.
“Can you—”
“I’ll put the pasta in,” Angela says at the same moment. Tina smiles, and Angela walks into the kitchen. When she returns a minute later, Tina has finished reading.
“That’s some letter.”
“I know. And this woman, Nancy, her birth mother was at one of those maternity homes they had after the war, for unmarried mothers, you know? Religious organizations like the Catholic Church and Salvation Army ran them. I did a quick search today; it’s a part of our history I didn’t really know about, and it’s bleak as hell.”
“Poor girl.”
“Yeah.”
Tina pauses. “So, what now?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. It seems the adoptive mother’s last wish was that this Nancy person go find her birth mother. I feel like I need to find Nancy and give her the letter and the note. She needs to know. I did the math, and the birth mother is probably still alive.”
Tina is quiet for a moment. Angela has trouble with silences; she always feels a need to fill the empty space.
“I called my mom right after I opened it. I was actually quite upset.”
“I can imagine. Must have hit a bit close to home for you.”
Angela nods. “Exactly. It did. Mom thinks if the birth mother really wanted Nancy to have the information, then I should try to find her. She knows how much I needed to find Sheila, how that affected me growing up. And it worked out well, right?”
Tina lets out a sigh. “That may be true, but honestly, Ange, I don’t think you should do anything about it.”
Angela freezes. “What?”
“It’s such a huge confession, like you said.”
“I know! That’s why I think I need to find Nancy.”
“But what good will it do? What if she doesn’t want this information? It would upend her life. This is an enormous shock.”
Angela sets her glass down again and pulls her knees back toward her chest, clutching the letter against her body. She feels somehow betrayed by Tina’s reaction, though she doesn’t quite know why. A lump forms in her throat. “But why shouldn’t she know? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be adopted and not know your birth mother?”
Tina touches her arm gently. “Of course I don’t, hun. I wouldn’t ever pretend to understand how that feels. But this Nancy person doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, right? And I just don’t think it’s your place to decide whether or not she has this information. It was her mother’s place to tell her, but the letter never got delivered. I won’t say maybe it was never meant to be delivered, but…” She shrugs. “Maybe it’s just as well that Nancy never received it. Her mother died with peace of mind, thinking her daughter would receive her confession and go find her birth mother. But because it wasn’t delivered, Nancy’s life wasn’t turned upside down with the knowledge.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m just saying maybe it’s better this way. Maybe you should just leave well enough alone. If you go looking for Nancy, you could end up in the middle of something really messy.”
Angela feels a surge of defensiveness. Tina is a women’s studies professor at the university, still getting traction in her career. She’s the rational sort who makes decisions based on evidence and fact and isn’t as tuned in to her emotional side as Angela is. It’s part of what makes them a good match, the way they counterbalance each other, but it means they sometimes butt heads.