My mother had the tea out, a pitcher and a glass of ice. She had the book section of the Times open on her lap, and was on her phone, typing with her thumbs. “It’s sweetened, just a little,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, surprised that she remembered not just what tea I liked, but how I liked it. I poured myself a glass and sat in one of the old Adirondack chairs. The chairs had always been there, in exactly the same spot. They were as hard and unpleasant to sit on as ever.
“Sorry, just need a sec,” Johanna said, without looking up. “The florist wants to know how we feel about black-eyed Susans.”
“Oh. Well, how do we feel?”
“I think we feel okay. The only thing Rochelle asked me was nothing red. She doesn’t like red. Well, I don’t like red, myself. Okay.” She finished and set down her phone. “I think we got lucky with the flowers. The florist is the sister-in-law of the woman who runs the knitting shop.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s good. Rochelle must have a lot of faith in you.”
“I think it’s more likely she doesn’t much care about wedding minutiae in general. She’s not doing a lot of overthinking. She’s wearing her mother’s wedding dress, you know.”
I nodded. I’d personally seen Rochelle’s mother’s wedding dress come out of a Tupperware container last fall. That it was wearable might say a great deal about the enduring genius of Tupperware, or it might say something else about the value of a good dry cleaner. But mostly it said something about Rochelle.
“Would you like to stay in for dinner?” Johanna asked. “I have some salmon and some corn. Or we could go out.”
“Oh. Either,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had cooked for the two of us. This seemed so noteworthy that I decided to say it aloud.
“When’s the last time you cooked for the two of us?”
Johanna frowned. “A long time, I suppose.”
“Like, a really long time. Did you cook when the triplets were growing up?”
“Well, some,” Johanna said. “We had Gloria full-time then, and she cooked. She made wonderful lasagna. I know you think you missed out on a lot of important stuff, but don’t worry, you didn’t miss much with my cooking.”
I smiled. I could feel the late sun on my legs. A not-unpleasant moment passed that way. Then I heard her say: “Did you ever wonder why it took us so long to have you? You never asked about it.”
Well. I took a breath. It occurred to me that I ought to be paying very close attention now. This remarkable opportunity—already I understood that it was an opportunity, and it was remarkable—might not come around again.
“Was I supposed to ask? Or were you just supposed to, you know, tell me?”
My mother didn’t respond right away. She was holding up her misshapen knitting project, examining some dropped stitch or knot in the wrong place.
“Look,” I finally said, “if this is it, if this is going to be the big reveal, you can spare yourself. I know it already. There were four of us. Dr. Lorenz Pritchard, of sainted memory, randomly picked the others to get born and me to go into the freezer. Seventeen years in liquid nitrogen. I guess I ought to thank you for remembering me.”
My mother was staring at me. “Which one of your siblings told you that?”
I shrugged. “It was kind of a joint effort. And in case you’re wondering, I know why, too. I’m pretty sure I know everything. And it wasn’t We might as well, either.”
“‘We might as well’？” Johanna said, mystified.
“I heard you say that, to Aunt Debbie. You were in the living room together. I think you’d had a root canal or something. We had the embryo, we could afford it, why not? Frankly, Mom, and I wanted to say this to you at the time, We might as well is not a good enough reason to bring a child into the world. But of course, as I eventually discovered, it happened to be completely untrue. So we never had that particular talk.”