Jennifer Weiner - Then Came You

“Watch her head,” I said pointlessly. India had Rory’s head tucked into the crook of her elbow, and she was doing Annie’s little bouncing move, like she’d been born knowing it, born with that baby in her arms. I sighed, feeling the strangest mix of sorrow and relief, and I worried, for a minute, that maybe I’d start crying, too. But I had a future, my whole life ahead of me, babies of my own, if I wanted them.

She looked at me, eyes brimming, above Rory’s head. Her bald spot was gone, and in its place was a thick tuft of glossy dark hair, the same hair as my brothers, and my dad. “Thank you,” she whispered.

I could have said something snotty, like Whatever, or It wasn’t like you had a choice. But she seemed at once so broken and so happy, standing in the room she’d decorated with the baby in her arms. . and so all I said was “You’re welcome.”

Iwaited by the doorway outside the primary school with the rest of the first-grade moms and sitters and the single stay-at-home dad, making small talk until the bell rang and the six-year-olds, all pleated skirts and scabby knees and oversized backpacks, came racing out into the sunshine.

“Rory! Over here!” She squinted, then her face broke into a smile as she ran toward me. Her dark-brown hair had come out of its ponytail and hung in ringlets around her cheeks, and her elfin face wore its usual merry expression. It always surprised me, how I felt when I saw her, how I loved her more than I’d thought it was possible to love anyone.

She pulled up right at my side, out of breath, and shoved a folded piece of paper into my hand. “We have to do a family tree.”

I took the paper, examining it.

“See. Look.” Rory snatched back the assignment, pointing at the lines that were connected to the tree trunk. “You have to put your mother and your father and your grandmother and grandfather and brothers and sisters if you’ve got them.” She paused for a breath. “Do you know Sophie has two brothers and two sisters?” Her tone suggested that she could barely imagine such riches.

“I do know that.” I also knew that Sophie’s parents had conceived both sets of twins with the help of donor insemination and all four children had been carried by two different surrogates at the same time. Maybe Rory’s tale wouldn’t be the only strange one in the class.

My daughter slipped her hand into mine, and we started the routines of our walk home. “Candy treat?” she asked as we passed the drugstore, and I said, “Okay.”

We went through the drugstore’s automatic doors — when she’d been little, Rory had loved to hop back and forth over the threshold, determining just how far inside she’d have to be to get the doors to work — and selected a bag of M&M’s. Rory counted each coin carefully before sliding it across the counter, then skipped home along the sidewalk, singing to herself, with the candy rattling in her pocket. Upstairs, in the apartment that Marcus had left me, along with more money than I could ever hope to spend, Rory sat at the kitchen table, sorting the M&M’s by color, lining them up in rows, then eating them one at a time, first brown, then yellow, then red, then blue, and then, finally, the green ones. She practiced her recorder for ten minutes, then looked at the schedule taped to the stainless-steel refrigerator. Wednesday was her recorder lesson; on Fridays, she had tumbling. On Sunday afternoons, Jules and Kimmie came over to spend the afternoon and take her out for dinner (these days, she favored sushi). Jules and Kimmie were married now. They’d had a sunset ceremony on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard and were talking about having a baby of their own. Kimmie was doing research for a pharmacology company, and Jules had left the world of finance, gone back to school for a journalism degree, and gotten what she laughingly called the last job as an investigative reporter at the last magazine left in New York.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, Bettina came over after work for dinner, and once a month she hosted Rory at her apartment downtown. She’d gone back to work at Kohler’s and was still dating Darren, and, while I didn’t think the two of us would ever be best friends, we enjoyed each other’s company well enough when Rory brought us together.

Once a month, Rory and I made the trip to Phoenixville, where Rory would spend the weekend with Annie and Frank and Frank Junior and Spencer, who doted on her, introducing her as their sister and treating her like a doll. Like Jules, Annie had gone back to school. In another year she’d have her bachelor’s degree, and then she’d apply for teaching jobs in the same school system her boys attended.

Sometimes I worried it was confusing — all these people, all these different places, different expectations, different rules — but Rory seemed to manage it all with aplomb. She was a natural negotiator, knowing, intuitively, how to get along and play well with others. In that — in so many ways, in little gestures, in the shape of her feet and her fingers, in the way she’d press her lips together, humming while she thought — she reminded me of her father.

“Homework,” I said, and she ran to her room. The nursery had been all pale pink and green when she’d been a baby, before her true nature had revealed itself. Rory wasn’t a pink-bedroom girl, although, like all her peers, she’d undergone a brief but fervent infatuation with the Disney princesses. Now her space was outfitted with an oversize desk that held footlong plastic bins in which Rory stored her Legos, her snap circuit kit, the collection of old cell phones and calculators she’d taken apart, and plastic bins full of laboriously printed and drawn plans labeled EXPERIMINTS AND INVENSHUNS.

We still lived in the apartment in the San Giacomo, but I’d sold the bottom floor, which meant we’d been reduced — quote-unquote — to just four bedrooms: one for me, one for Rory, and two guest suites with their own bathrooms for whoever came to stay, Bettina and Darren, Annie and Frank and their boys. I’d given a lot of the art away to museums and let go of most of the staff, although I still had someone to clean, and to cook when I entertained. I’d gone back to work part-time, and I volunteered at Rory’s school, organizing fund-raising events and the annual Book and Bake Sale, raising money for the new library and the class trips to Portugual and Spain that Rory would take as an eighth-grader. I’d even made two friends, other mothers with kids in Rory’s class, one married, one single. I’d thought about dating, but hadn’t yet. Secretly, I suspected that that part of my life was over. I’d had my big love, and now, at forty-eight (although my friends told me I didn’t look a day over forty), I had memories, friends, a weird kind of family, and a daughter I loved with all my heart. . and, surely, there were worse things than that.

Rory came dashing back into the room in her favorite sparkly T-shirt (white, long-sleeved, with a sequined heart on the chest) and a pair of navy-blue Columbia sweatpants that Kimmie had given her. We sat in the kitchen, the room where Rory and I spent most of our time together. I’d moved one of the Persian rugs from the apartment I’d sold into one of the kitchen’s corners and bought a round table and four chairs, and moved my laptop from the desk in the dressing room onto the kitchen counter. Rory would do her homework at one end of the table; I’d sit, with my laptop, at the opposite end, where I would look up recipes or send out notices about fund-raisers and committee meetings, and e-mail pictures to Annie.

Rory smoothed the page on the table. She’d written her name in big capital letters in the center of the tree trunk.