“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I looked up from the small plane window. Beneath us, the cars speeding around the highways of the Detroit Metro area glittered. We’d be landing, soon, and making the drive from DTW to Ann Arbor, where I’d meet my little sister for the first time.
With a heavy sigh, I leaned my head back on the seat. “I’m thinking that I’m going to meet this girl and not live up to whatever expectation she has of me. I’m thinking that we’re going to meet with the transplant surgeon tomorrow, and he’s going to tell me that I’ve let them turn me into a pincushion for nothing. I’m thinking that I’m going to let these people down, and they’re never going to want to see me, again.”
Neil kissed the top of my head and rested his cheek against it. “I wish there was something I could say to allay these worries. Some reassurance—”
“I know there isn’t.” And it didn’t help to talk about how futile my worries were. “Right now, I’m trying to think positive. I’m going to meet this girl, she’s going to love me, and I’m going to be able to give her my kidney.”
I kept repeating that mentally from the plane to the car to the hotel. We’d gotten suites for ourselves and for Molly and Susan and their mother at Weber’s Inn. Neil had suggested we pick two different hotels, in case the meeting didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped, but I’d shot that down. I didn’t want to seem like I wanted distance, or thought I was too good for them. When our hired car pulled up beneath the hotel’s ultra-modern awning, my guts churned.
“Are you ready?” Neil asked, pushing his door open.
I forced myself to calm down. I didn’t need a horrible bout of nervous diarrhea right before I met them. We’d made arrangements to meet in the Habitat Lounge, one of the hotel’s restaurants, for lunch. Neil generously tipped the bellman who met us beside the car and entrusted him with getting our luggage to our room, so we could go directly to our meeting.
“We’re late,” I mumbled under my breath as we crossed the stylish lobby. Everything was brand new, with just a pinch of retro-chic, from the hanging lights with cylindrical black shades above the sleek wood-paneled front desk to the messy looping brown, gold and creme pattern on the stiff armchairs beside the slim rectangular fireplace. A seating area faced huge windows with views of a meticulously landscaped outdoor space.
“We’re ten minutes late, dear. Considering air travel and a drive were involved, I’m sure they’ll understand.” Neil frowned and tugged at the sleeve of his blue linen sports coat. We’d changed on the jet, so we’d look more presentable. He’d paired the jacket with a salmon-colored plaid print button-down and jeans, and gorgeous brown leather loafers.
He really had marvelous taste in shoes.
I hadn’t taken the time to do my hair properly, opting to pull it back into a tight, high ponytail. My bright yellow sleeveless O-neck sundress was the perfect compromise between dressy and casual, and it went well with my very minimal makeup. I wanted to look like I cared about meeting them, but not like I was trying to be flashy.
The Habitat Lounge was a little more like a nightclub than I’d expected it to be. It had the same clash-of-the-time-periods feel that the lobby had and was far busier than I’d expected it to be. I told the hostess we were meeting someone, all while looking over her shoulder, trying to see Susan. Luckily, the hostess knew exactly who we were supposed to meet and led the way.
With every step we took, my throat grew drier. What was I doing? These people didn’t want to meet me. They wanted my kidney. Why was I putting them through all of this, when we would probably never hear from each other again afterward?
“Here we are,” the hostess said as we reached a corner table set for six. The first face I saw was Susan’s, and I felt oddly relieved to see her. We’d already met, so she could be the intermediary between me and her sister and mom.
The other two women at the table turned to look up at us. Molly hadn’t yet lost the roundness of teendom; when she smiled, the apples of her cheeks were full and rosy. She shared the same tan skin as Susan, but her hair had a purple sheen to it. Square black-rimmed hipster glasses rested on her nose, and a glare partially hid her dark eyes. She bolted from her seat and threw her arms around me, crying, “Sophie!” as though we’d known each other all our lives. Her long, thin arms were banded with a mish-mash of bracelets that ranged from black cording with metal charms to braided string and metal bangles.
Caught off-guard, I hugged her back, trying not to notice the guarded expressions of Susan and her mother. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
Neil extended his hand to their mother. “Neil Elwood. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Sasha Tangen.” The older woman took his hand briefly, her eyes flicking back to me as I stepped away from Molly. Sasha shook her head and looked down. “I’m sorry. I just wasn’t prepared… You look so much like him.”
A lump stuck in my throat.
“Susan,” Neil said, shaking her hand before pulling out a chair for me. But my feet were stuck to the ground.
“Did you see the pool?” Molly asked, either oblivious to or trying to ignore the tension. “It’s kidney-shaped.”
I laughed with her, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t vomit on the table. Before I took my seat, I reached for Sasha’s hand. “Hi. I’m Sophie Scaife.”
“I appreciate you being here,” Sasha said, some of the shock on her face easing. “I know it’s a long trip.”
“This place is so cool,” Molly cut in. “The bathroom mirror has Bluetooth. You can hook it up to your phone. Like, so it can sing to you.”
“So, the accommodations are—” Neil began, only to have Susan cut him off.
“It’s too much. Really. You didn’t have to do this,” she said quietly.
“It’s our pleasure,” I said firmly. “I want you guys to be comfortable. And if you don’t like it here, we can pick somewhere else when we come for the actual…”
For the surgery. Which I didn’t want to think about. We still didn’t know if I was a suitable match. Our blood types were compatible, but there was so much more to it that I had no idea about going in. I’d had another blood test, urine tests to make sure my kidneys were functioning, something about cross-matching… The past few weeks had been nonstop, and it might have been all for nothing.
“Really, everything you’ve done and offered to do is…” Sasha shook her head. “We are very grateful.”
The last part was directed somewhat firmly at Susan.
“We haven’t checked in, yet,” Neil said, eager to keep the small talk going. “But I do look forward to the singing mirror.”
Molly’s eyes sparkled with admiration. Then, she said, “You’re like…way old.”
“Molly!” Sasha snapped.
“No, I meant, like, way older than Sophie.” Molly gestured to me. “I know you’re twenty-eight, so you’re way old, too—”
“Molly, stop talking,” Susan said through gritted teeth.
I laughed, relieved to be back in familiar territory. “It’s not a big deal. We get that all the time.”
“Well, I don’t get it all the time, because I’m not ‘way old’, as you put it,” Neil told Molly. “But, yes, I’m much older than your sister.”
The word was out there. Oh, my god, it was out there, and there was no putting it back in. I thought of all the things Susan and I had talked about, how we weren’t sure how to go forward. I knew we couldn’t go backward. And Molly looked so pleased. What would happen if she wanted a relationship we just couldn’t have? Would I hurt her the way Joey Tangen had hurt me?
“You’re retired, I hear?” Sasha asked, and I wondered how much Susan had filled her in on. She hadn’t looked surprised to see a middle-aged husband accompanying me.
Neil reached for the glass of water sweating on the tablecloth. “Yes. Before Sophie and I married.”
“I didn’t think businessmen retired. I thought you just ran for president,” Sasha said, with a smile that indicated friendly teasing. It was immediately apparent that, of the three, Susan was the more reserved.
It may not have made her a particularly warm ambassador for her family, but it meant she was cautious, and I appreciated that.
Neil’s eyebrows rose. “Please, no comparisons there. That man is insufferable.”
“Mostly, Neil stays home with his granddaughter. We take care of her, since Neil’s daughter passed away.” I wondered if Sasha had read my book, the way Susan had. I wondered how much they all knew about me, already.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Sasha said, her forehead creasing in concern.
“Thank you,” Neil said. Then, after a sudden deep breath, he picked up the menu on the table and changed the subject. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m absolutely starving.”
“They have sushi!” Molly said, flapping her hands excitedly. “I have never had sushi before.”
“You’ll have to try some, then,” I told her. Unbidden, images of taking Molly to the best sushi restaurants in New York flooded my mind. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to impress her with the stuff I could give her—besides a kidney—and win her over the way I couldn’t win over Susan. My gaze dropped to the Hamilton T-shirt Molly wore. “Susan said you like Broadway?”
“Oh, my god, yes!” Molly drew the word out, long and impassioned. “My school got to go see Guys and Dolls in Toronto last year. But I’ve never been to New York. Maybe after the surgery, I could come visit you!”
“Don’t invite yourself,” Susan said, a little too sharp.
“She’s always welcome,” Neil said smoothly. “Even if you end up not liking the sushi.”
Maybe I should have been upset that he’d contradicted Susan’s admonishment, but I wasn’t. Susan probably didn’t want Molly to become too attached, and that was fine. But if there was one sister who wanted to know me, even if it was just because I was a living link to theater tickets, I would take it.
We placed our orders, and Molly did order one of the two sushi rolls on the limited menu. While we waited for our food, we chatted more with Sasha and Molly. Like my mom, Sasha worked at a hospital, but she was a nurse, not a monitor tech. Her other daughter, Renee, worked for Habitat for Humanity and lived in Oregon. We probably wouldn’t meet her, Molly had told us with a little bit of a bitter sigh, because she never came back for visits.
“Renee is kind of a snob,” Susan said stiffly.
Sasha gave her daughter a look. “She doesn’t mean to be a snob. She’s just got a different life than we do.”
If Renee was a snob because she had a different life, what did that make us to Susan? We already knew what her husband thought of us. Did whatever feelings she had toward Renee bleed over onto us, as well?
“Sophie has a different life than we do,” Molly observed, taking a sip from her Coke. “And she’s not a snob.”
“I can be, sometimes,” I admitted. “But I was like that way, way before my life was different.”
“Sophie was a snob out of the womb, to hear her mother tell it,” Neil said with an uncomfortable laugh.
Conversation lapsed for a moment, and Sasha broke the silence with, “I suppose we should talk about the transplant.”
“Mom, the food isn’t even here, yet,” Susan said quietly. “We didn’t even get past soup the last time.”
“Well, nobody ordered soup. So, that’s solved,” Sasha said brightly.
“And Travis isn’t here,” Molly added. Her mother and sister gave her such quick looks, she meekly added, “What? He isn’t.”
“I know I said it before,” Sasha began, with a warning side-eye to her youngest. “But I can’t tell you enough how grateful I am that you would help us out. Even if the kidney falls through—”
“God forbid,” Neil put in.
She nodded. “But even so…we got your check. It’s too generous, really.”
“It will barely cover the costs you’ll incur in the first year,” Susan said, and I wondered if they’d fought about keeping the money. She quickly added, “Not that it wasn’t generous, or I think you should do more. I just want my mother to understand how much you’re helping her out, and that she doesn’t need to turn down that help.”
“Please, think nothing of it,” Neil said. “Medicine, surgery, all of that is so expensive here. There’s no reason it should be a hardship for you when we can help.”
Sasha looked doubtful. “I don’t want you to think that we can’t make it on our own. I have very good benefits. And Joey had life insurance—”
My heart clenched at the mention of his name. I thought back to her earlier comment, about how much I looked like him, and I felt sick. I didn’t want to talk about him in the past tense. I didn’t want to talk about him at all, and definitely not with the people he’d chosen over me.
My internal reaction must have shown on my face, because Sasha stopped herself. “Sophie…I know this must be very hard for you. Because of the circumstances.”
“Because my father abandoned me?” The words shot out before I could consider the effect they might have on the women. “Yeah, that makes this kind of hard.”
Molly looked down at the table. Susan avoided my eyes. But Sasha’s gaze remained fixed on me in motherly understanding. “Sophie, I want you to know that what Joey did… He regretted it until the day he died.”
I’m sure it was meant to comfort me, but it didn’t. “There was a lot of time where he could have corrected his mistake.” I took a deep breath. “Look, he was your husband, and he was Molly and Susan’s dad. I’m not asking you to not love him, or to change the way you feel about him. But I’m pretty messed up. I probably always will be. And knowing that he regretted messing me up, but not enough to do anything about it… That doesn’t make me feel any better. It actually makes it kind of worse.”
“I’m sorry,” Sasha said. Her eyes filled with tears. “I wish he could have been a better father to you.”
You and me both, I thought, but resisted the temptation to say it. “You’re not responsible for what he did or didn’t do. Neither is Susan or Molly. That’s why I’m here. I’m not here for him. I’m here for you guys.”
The words lifted a weight off my chest, one I hadn’t been aware of until it was gone. I’d been carrying it with me since the night of the reunion, and now, it eased. I couldn’t win my father over by helping his daughter. He was dead, and that chance had passed. Giving Molly my kidney was my choice, and while I’d been afraid that it was influenced by my desperation to prove my worth, those feelings evaporated in an instant. I wanted this. I wanted to give someone something to improve their life. I wanted Molly to have a future. And that want had to do with the girl sitting in front of me, and nothing to do with Joey Tangen.
The server arrived, providing me with a blessed respite from the conversation. We all smiled and pretended to be normal as we received our plates. Once the waitress was gone, though, we had no choice but to go back.
“You’re going to give your kidney to a stranger just because?” Molly asked quietly. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded confident and bubbly since we’d sat down. “Even though Dad—”
“It’s not just because,” I stated firmly. “I think you and I have a lot in common, from what Susan tells me. More than just blood. And I remember what it was like to want a future that seemed out of reach. I want you to be able to have yours.”
“I don’t just want your body parts,” she said, a bit of her spark returning. “You’re my sister, even if I didn’t know it.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You already have two sisters. You don’t think three is too many?”
“Heck, no! Plus, we look like we’re the same size. I want to borrow some rich, expensive clothes.”
Neil and Sasha both chuckled. Susan even cracked a smile.
“You know what?” I asked. And though every part of me was fully aware that I was putting Sasha and Susan in an uncomfortable position by not asking their permission first, I blurted, “Twelve Oaks Mall is, like, forty-five minutes away. If you want rich, expensive clothes, let’s go. Right now. Anything you want.”
“Oh, Sophie, no,” Sasha began. “That’s too much.”
“Mom, can I go? Please?” Molly pleaded, and I gave Sasha my very best puppy dog eyes, too. It was unfair. I would apologize later.
To my surprise, Susan backed me up. “Sophie is willing to give up a kidney. We can spare Molly for a few hours.”
“And you’re welcome to go with them, I’m sure,” Neil added. Probably because he was a parent and knew exactly how reluctant parents could be about letting their children run off with strangers.
Sasha considered only for a blink of an eye. “It would be a nice chance for them to connect. As long as you don’t spoil her.”
“I can’t promise that,” I said, because I had every intention of spoiling her.
“Yeah,” Molly said. “Let her spoil me. I’m a dying urchin.”
“You are not allowed to use your condition as an excuse,” Sasha said sternly. With a heavy sigh, she said, “Fine. You can go.”
Molly sped through her lunch in record time then hopped up and declared, “I’m going to the room to get changed!”
“You’ve changed twice today,” Susan reminded her.
Sasha waved a hand. “She brought enough clothes for a month, let alone a week.”
When Molly practically skipped away, Sasha fixed me with an intense stare. It was the first time she seemed…not unfriendly, but not friendly either. “I don’t know what your intentions are. I believe in my heart that they’re honest. But my heart has been wrong before. If you come into Molly’s life like this, you can’t disappoint her. Not after what she went through, losing her father.”
Did she forget who she’s talking to?
I didn’t want to make her feel bad. And I didn’t want to create strain between us. Not now that I’d met Molly. But I couldn’t let it pass without comment.
“Believe me,” I said firmly. “I know what it’s like to have someone let you down.”
****
After we finished our meal, I told Sasha to have Molly meet me in the lobby in an hour. That gave Neil and me time to check in and go to our room, where I could quickly rinse the travel sweat off my body.
“You shouldn’t have done that, you know,” Neil said, raising his voice over the sound of the rainfall shower. “It wasn’t very fair to Sasha.”
“It wasn’t very fair for my dad to abandon me, but here we are.” I hummed to myself, trying not to think bad thoughts about the woman who’d been so nice to me. But she was his wife. She had to have known that I existed, right? Why hadn’t she done something about it?
“Sasha is not your father,” Neil said, my view of him slightly blurred by the fog on the shower door.
I hit the taps and stepped out, shaking water off my flimsy plastic shower cap. Neil flinched from it. I pulled it off and flicked it at him. “What, are you going to melt? And no, Sasha isn’t my father. But she was married to him. Call me naive, but I happen to think that spouses have some measure of influence over each other.”
“We don’t know the whole situation,” Neil reminded me, dropping the shower cap in the sink and grimacing at the wet spots on his shirt. “You could refrain from antagonizing her in the meantime.”
I wrapped a towel around my waist and sauntered out of the bathroom. “You think I’m taking Molly shopping to antagonize Sasha?”
Neil followed me and kept his eyes trained on the floor. “Sophie, stop trying to derail a serious conversation with…brazen toplessness. I am not going to be comfortable with any of this until you promise me that you’re not trying to get under Sasha’s skin. Or Susan’s.”
“Give me a little more credit than that, please.” I rolled my eyes. And remained brazenly topless. “I want to take Molly out to have a good time. She’s dealing with some deeply unpleasant shit. There’s nothing wrong with giving her a little escape. Plus, of the sisters I have that I have met, she seems like she’s going to be the easiest one to get along with at the moment.”
Neil pinched the bridge of his nose and squinched up his face. “There are so many possible pitfalls here, and I’m concerned that you’re not seeing any of them. Or, if you do see them, you’re choosing to ignore them.”
“I’m not going to fall into any pits.” How could I make him understand that everything he was saying had already been run as a scenario in my mind, over and over again, since before I’d even met Molly? “I haven’t ignored anything. Trust me, with my past? I have a much clearer perspective on all of this than you do.”
He looked up, his gaze halting on my tits for only a split-second. “And you’re not trying to buy Molly’s affection?”
I shrugged. “I’m already giving her a kidney. Is buying her affection really avoidable?”
“Touché.” He held up his hands in surrender.
“What are you going to do while I’m gone?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was kind of ditching him. “Unless you want to come along?”
“No, I think you can spend our money quite well enough on your own.” Three years ago, he wouldn’t have made that joke. Now, we were comfortable enough with each other that he could. “I suppose I’ll just stay here. Maybe visit the fitness center.”
My lips quirked to the side. “You’re going to order dessert from room service and take a nap, aren’t you?”
“That’s likely,” he admitted, flopping onto the bed like a twelve-year-old and kicking up his feet as he grabbed the remote. “I’m putting a dollar amount on this shopping trip today.”
“Excuse me?” That wasn’t like Neil at all.
“I think you need a limit, to prevent you going overboard,” he said evenly. “You’ve told me, time and again, that working- and middle-class people have issues with just being handed things. You wouldn’t want to bring this girl back and offend her mother and sister by inadvertently implying they couldn’t afford to give her the things she needs.”
“Good point.” I played along, because while Neil was trying to be practical and thoughtful, I had a feeling he didn’t have a clue what an offensive amount of money was. “Okay, Mr. Moderation. How much are we allowed to spend?”
He considered. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
I dissolved into a snorting laughter fit.
“What?” he demanded, looking a bit hurt. “Is that not enough?”
“No, it’s fine.” I doubted we’d find even ten thousand dollars’ worth of things for Molly to buy; Neil really had no idea how much things cost when they weren’t bespoke and made from ultra-extravagant materials. “I’ll reign myself in.”
Washed and dressed again—this time in a blazer, T-shirt, and jeans so as to prevent mall-walking thigh chaffing—I headed down to the lobby. Molly waited for me, slouched on one of the chairs. She had changed, too, into black jeans with a hole in one knee and a black and gray horizontal-striped V-neck T-shirt. Her hair hung loose down her back, and as she concentrated on the phone in her hand, she reached up to tuck some strands behind her ear.
Holy cow. I could have been looking at myself a decade ago.
She looked up, saw me, and her entire face transformed. For a moment, she’d looked sullen and serious, but her bright smile and shining eyes returned as I approached. “I thought you would be late!”
She rose to hug me, and I couldn’t think of a way—or a reason—to refuse. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you’re rich. Aren’t rich people always late?” she asked, as though it were common knowledge.
“I wasn’t always rich,” I reminded her. “I grew up in Calumet.”
Her eyes grew wide. “No way. Calumet? That’s like…the middle of nowhere.”
I shrugged. “All my clothes came from Pamida.”
Her brow creased.
“Shopko?” I tried, and she nodded in recognition.
How could someone make me feel so impossibly old? I was only twenty-eight.
I noticed the black sedan outside the glass lobby doors. “Our ride is here. Let’s go.”
She followed me out, moving somewhat cautiously toward the vehicle. “You didn’t drive your own car? Like, you didn’t even rent one?”
“This one is kind of rented,” I explained, nodding to the driver as he opened the door for us. I motioned to Molly to get inside then got in myself. “But we live in New York. We don’t generally drive ourselves around. Well, Neil does. But he actually likes driving.”
“I can’t wait to get my license,” she said with a sigh. “I am so sick of having to beg for rides from my mom or my friends.”
“I remember those days.” Living in the U.P. without an independent mode of transportation was like living in an underground bunker, isolated from the rest of the world. At least, it had felt that way when I was a teen. “Do you have a snowmobile?”
“I did, but it broke down last year, and without Dad to fix it…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away, out the window.
I gave her a moment to compose herself and mentally added “snowmobile” to the list of stuff I needed to buy her. But we had time for that, and time for me to ask Sasha permission before I gave her daughter a potentially dangerous recreational vehicle.
“When do you think you’ll get your license?” I asked, changing the subject back to the holy grail of teen transportation. “You’re already sixteen, right?”
“I missed driver’s training last year because I was too sick,” she explained. “So, Mom’s trying to teach me, now, and I’m studying the handbook online. I’m going to try to do segment one before the surgery, at least.”
“How long will you have to recover?” I asked. I’d done plenty of research on how long my recovery would be, but shamefully little on what would happen to Molly.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably a year? And I’ll have to be on drugs for like, the rest of my life.”
“Neil had a transplant,” I told her. “Bone marrow. But it was his own, so there wasn’t as high a chance of rejection.”
I wouldn’t tell her how sick he got right afterward. Nobody wanted to hear about what could go wrong when they were facing something that was already scary.
“Did he have cancer?” Molly asked. Apparently, Susan hadn’t shared the details of my book with her. Which was good, because I would rather Molly not know my books existed. I wanted her to get to know me firsthand and not form an opinion of me based on research, as Susan had done.
I nodded. “He had leukemia.”
“Can I ask you a question?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Neil is like…super old.”
“That’s not really a question.” But I knew what she was getting at. “Yeah, he’s twenty-four years older than me.”
“So…are you married to him because he’s rich?” If anyone else had asked, I might have been offended. In fact, people had asked me that before, and I’d absolutely been offended. But Molly was sixteen, caught between adulthood and childhood, and innocent childish curiosity was the clear motive behind her inquiry. She wasn’t passing judgment or insinuating I was a bad person. She was just trying to process me.
“No. I didn’t know he was rich when we first met.” And the details of that meeting weren’t anything she needed to hear about. I would not regale her with tales of my own teenage adventures. At least, not that one.
“So, why are you married to him? You’re pretty. You could get a younger guy.” Her backhanded compliment actually felt flattering.
“Thank you. But age doesn’t really matter to me. I married Neil because I fell in love with him. And he’s my best friend.” I paused. “I mean, other than my best friends that I’m not romantically involved with.”
She sighed, clearly disappointed in my answer. Though what she’d expected, I couldn’t guess. “Well, I’m glad you’re happy.”
“And I’m glad we’re finally meeting.” A lump rose in my throat. Finally meeting my sister, who I hadn’t known about for sixteen years of her life…. That seemed so unfair.
“I know.” She examined her chipped nail polish, exactly the way I would have held my hand to do the same. “I didn’t even know you were alive until Dad was dying.”
“Did he tell you?” Maybe it was unethical to interrogate a minor for details, but it still bothered me that I didn’t know the extent to which my existence had been kept secret.
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah. When they found his cancer…well, when he found out he couldn’t donate to me, he told us. Susan and Renee and me. I was really angry because why wouldn’t he tell us if we had another sister? Did you know about us?”
“Vaguely,” I admitted. “I’d heard that my father had another family, but I didn’t know the details. I didn’t really want to know them.”
She frowned. “Why wouldn’t you want to know if you had another family?”
“Because I didn’t really feel like you were my family.” I hurried to soften the blow as her face fell. “It’s not anything personal. I’m very glad to get to know you, now. But your dad wasn’t a dad to me. I only met him a few times. We never talked. He probably wouldn’t have recognized me if he’d run into me on the street.”
“I think he would have,” she said sadly. “You look just like him.”
It struck me suddenly that I hated hearing that. I hated knowing that I shared something with the man who’d abandoned me. All my life, people had told me I had my mother’s eyes or her expressions. All along, it was just because they had no other basis for comparison. Now, these strangers were insisting that I somehow had something in common with my absent father, and it stung. Like they were ripping me away from the family who’d actually taken the time to love me and raise me.
It was wholly irrational and not Molly’s fault. She was a teenager, a sick teenager who needed an organ transplant. She had enough stress and drama in her life. She didn’t need mine.
I was about to change the subject when she blurted, “Mom thinks he didn’t see you when you were little because of his dad.”
“Oh?” Poised on the brink of uncovering yet another clue in the mystery of Joey Tangen, I couldn’t back away, even though I knew I shouldn’t let her tell me.
“Yeah. We never saw him. I guess he wasn’t a great dad, either.” It wasn’t enough. I needed to know more, but I couldn’t pry. But I would definitely ask Sasha or Susan about it, later.
A sense of being close to answers I’d never thought I would obtain almost urged me to demand the driver turn the car around. I wanted to run back to Sasha and ask her to clarify Molly’s unintentionally cryptic remarks. But the point of our outing was to give Molly a good time. My issues would have to get worked out later.
The Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi was basically the mall in the Detroit Metro area. I’d never been there, but one of my friends had during a U of M campus visit. She’d come home with a map, an honest-to-god printed map of the place. That’s how big it was; someone could get lost in it.
“Holy crap,” Molly said as we pulled up in front of the doors. “There’s valet parking.”
“Yes, there is,” I observed coolly, like I wasn’t also shocked to see a mall with valet parking.
And I was a freaking billionaire.
“Hey, there’s a Cheesecake Factory,” I said, pointing toward the unmistakable gold edifice. “We should get some dessert before we head back. If you’re allowed to have sugary stuff. I don’t actually know that much about your disease.”
“It’s not diabetes,” she said. “I try to eat healthy, but it’s hard to stick to the diet. Stuff is too expensive. But yeah, cheesecake is not going to kill me today.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear, again, and for the first time, I noticed the glint of plastic in her ear.
“Is that a hearing aid?” I asked, before I could remember my manners.
Molly rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Alport Syndrome wrecks your hearing. And your eyes. Hence the stupid glasses.”
“I don’t think they’re stupid,” I told her firmly. “I think they’re very hip.”
“They were. Like two years ago.”
It wasn’t just the fashion that was outdated, then. If she wasn’t having her eyes checked every year…
The healthcare debate in America definitely bummed me out. People should be able to afford medical care. But since I didn’t really have a problem affording anything, it had been easy to be outraged in the abstract. Now, hearing that my sister couldn’t afford new glasses every year, even though she had a disease that affected her eyes, made me indescribably furious. I wasn’t going to just write to my representatives. I was going to start buying off politicians.
We got out of the car and headed for the doors. I stopped her just outside of them. “Okay, so here’s the deal. You can have anything you want.”
Her eyes lit up. “You don’t mean ‘anything’, right?”
“No, I mean it. Anything,” I promised. “Clothes, jewelry, makeup, anything you want. This is a shopping spree.” As if to prove it to her, I unsnapped my purse and fished out my black Centurion card. “Do you know what this is?”
She took it from me with trembling hands. “No. Shit.”
“No shit,” I confirmed, taking it back to tuck it safely away. “I want this thing to melt from overuse.”
She fixed me with a very serious stare. “I can do that.”
And wow. She totally could. We bopped away from the M.A.C. counter at Macy’s with every outrageous shade of lipstick and eyeshadow that they made—it briefly occurred to me that I should have asked Sasha if Molly was allowed to wear makeup, but it was too late at that point. Hot Topic turned into a free-for-all of fandom branded T-shirts and painfully short skirts—another area where I would have to beg Sasha for forgiveness. Molly shopped the way I would have if someone had told me to go no-limits berserk in a mall at her age. By the time we hit the Apple store for a rose gold MacBook Air and matching iPhone, I actually started to worry about Neil’s dollar limit.
“My arms hurt,” Molly complained as we trudged out with the laptop. For a computer that weighed practically nothing, the box sure was heavy.
“Hang on. You stay right there.” I pointed to some benches. “I’m going to enlist some help.”
A mall security guard passed by, and I flagged him down with my biggest, most flirty smile. “Hey there. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He frowned suspiciously and nodded. I would have taken a five-hundred-dollar bet that he was in training to become a cop.
“Hi. We’re spending a vulgar amount of money here today,” I said, gesturing to Molly, surrounded by bags. “And it’s getting really hard to carry our purchases. Maybe there’s someone in the mall offices who’d be willing to help us out?”
I batted my eyelashes for effect.
Considering the proximity of the mall to some of the wealthiest suburbs in Michigan, it didn’t surprise me when he responded as though the request was routine and reasonable. “Let me radio down there and see what I can do.”
About fifteen minutes later, two very solicitous gentlemen in suits joined us to carry our purchases.
“This is the way you live all the time?” Molly asked in wonder.
“Not all the time. I actually don’t go shopping all that often.” I’d picked up a few things for myself from Nordstrom’s today, but nothing on the scale of Molly’s capitalist demolition.
“I would,” she said without hesitation. “I would go shopping like this every day.”
“I just don’t have the time. I’ve got my work, I’ve got Olivia—”
“That’s Neil’s granddaughter, right?” Molly asked, as though she were taking mental notes.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s her. We didn’t bring her because—”
“Because you have a nanny?” she finished for me.
“Because she’s with her grandmother.” I didn’t want to give Molly the impression that we habitually abandoned Olivia just because we could. “We do have a nanny, but I like to be able to be home to spend time with Olivia. I don’t think it’s good for a kid to grow up without spending time with the people who love them.”
She went quiet and thoughtful for a moment. “I guess you would know about that. Because of Dad.”
I didn’t want to ruminate on the subject, because it appeared to bother her. Molly deserved to still think of her dad as the loving, kind man who’d raised her, even though he hadn’t done the same for me. It was difficult enough watching Susan struggle with all of this, and she was almost ten years older.
“Why don’t we go get something for your mom and for Susan?” I noticed a jeweler up ahead. “Do they like jewelry?”
“Mom doesn’t have much jewelry. Just her wedding ring. She sold pretty much everything else when we needed to buy this.” Molly tapped her hearing aid.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Then, I think you should pick her out something really nice.”
Granted, a precious gem would probably boost me over Neil’s ridiculous dollar limit. But Sasha Tangen had sold everything but her wedding ring so her daughter could hear. It was ridiculous and just plain wrong that she’d had to make the choice.
With a little guidance, Molly picked out a pair of round-cut diamond earrings for Sasha, and some teardrop pearls for Susan, since we decided we shouldn’t forget her. Then, Molly’s eyes fell upon a set of necklaces. When pushed together, the pendants made a platinum heart, with a small sapphire in each half.
“Hey, that’s my birthstone!” Molly exclaimed.
My throat stuck shut, but I managed to rasp out, “Mine, too.”
“My birthday is September eighteenth. What’s yours?” she asked excitedly.
“September twenty-first.” Just a few days—and years—apart. I wondered how Joey Tangen had felt about that. Had he even noticed the coincidence?
“We should get this,” Molly stated firmly. “This is here for a reason. You can have half, and I can have half. Like a friendship bracelet, but for sisters.”
I hesitated. What would Susan think? What would Sasha think? I was already in way too deep with the computer and the clothes. Symbolically-binding jewelry might be way over the line. “Won’t our kidneys be like a friendship bracelet?”
She snorted. “Yeah, probably. But this is something we can wear on the outside, to remember each other. Since I don’t know when I’ll see you, again.”
Oh, man. She really knew how to tug at my heartstrings. And my purse strings. I nodded to the woman behind the brightly illuminated glass counter, who was no doubt ready to swoon at the commission she was about to make off us.
“Thank you, Sophie,” Molly said, suddenly far more serious and mature than I’d seen her. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“I know I didn’t. But I wanted to. I remember what it was like to be your age. If someone had done this for me—”
“No. Not the shopping.” She paused, her face scrunched up in concentration as she searched for her words. “If my dad hadn’t raised me…if he had done to me what he did to you, maybe I wouldn’t be so cool about meeting my sister. I probably wouldn’t even care enough to give away my kidney.”
“I think you would.” There was no way that someone as gregarious and positive as Molly would bear that kind of grudge. “But there are other factors here, too. You know that Neil’s daughter died.”
Molly nodded.
“Well, I don’t know your mom very well. But I don’t want anyone to go through what I saw Neil go through. And if I’d needed help when I was your age, I would have hoped someone would be kind enough to have given it to me.”
She leaped at me, her gangly arms wrapping around me in a huge, tight hug. I had no doubt that she meant what she’d said; this wasn’t about a shopping spree or having a rich relative. She was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for, and she’d considered this meeting and this transplant from my angle, the way I’d considered it from hers.
We wore the necklaces out of the store.
After a stop at the Cheesecake Factory for the promised dessert, we headed back to the hotel. Molly talked a blue streak all the way, filling me in on her school and her friends and her hobbies. She loved Sondheim, though he “writes like he hates sight readers”, and loathed Andrew Lloyd Webber, who “writes like he hates singers”. She idolized Kristin Chenoweth and wanted desperately to be in a production of Spring Awakening before she was “too old”. Her dreams were no different than scores of other teens’, but as far as I was concerned, they were unique and precious.
Any reservations I’d had about meeting Molly had been totally removed by just a few hours of shopping. There was no doubt in my mind, now, that I would want to maintain a relationship with her. I wouldn’t drop out of her life the way Joey Tangen had dropped out of mine, and the thought that anyone felt I might be capable of that, especially when it came to a girl as bright and friendly and loving as Molly, made me ill.
But as we pulled up to the hotel and the bellman started unloading our bags, dread began to creep over me. I really had gone a little far with the purchases. And to anyone outside of my head, I would look like I was overcompensating. Maybe I was.
“What’s all this?” Sasha asked with a laugh of disbelief as she crossed the lobby. All of Molly’s treasures were piled high on a luggage cart, and I suddenly wanted to dive behind it and hide.
Instead, I held my head high and gave her a big smile. “Making up for missed Christmases and birthdays.”
“Sophie bought me a computer!” Molly practically shouted in her excitement. She pushed her hair back, exposing her half of the necklace set we’d bought. “And look! So, we can remember each other when we’re far away.”
I pointed to the pendant at my throat. “It was Molly’s idea. She is very thoughtful.”
“She’s sentimental,” Sasha corrected me, and pointed to the trolley of shopping bags. “This is thoughtful. But it’s too much. I can’t let you—”
I held up my hand. “Please. I had a great time today. And for once, I got to go shopping and not hear Neil complain about where we’ll put everything.”
Sasha laughed, a little uncomfortably. “I don’t know where we’ll put it all. We might be sitting on some of this on the ride home.”
“We can ship some,” I volunteered. I did not want them to return a single thing Molly had wanted. “And I swear, I won’t make a regular thing out of this.”
Sasha’s kind expression flickered, reminding me of Susan and the way she’d looked when she’d told me she wouldn’t have looked me up if not for Molly needing the kidney. So, Sasha hadn’t considered me to be a permanent part of Molly’s life, either?
I wanted to shout that Molly was my sister, and I had every right to be in her life, but I couldn’t. Sasha hadn’t said anything to contrary. I’d projected that onto her out of my own doubts and Susan’s words. Instead, I said, “Listen, can we meet up later tonight? Just the two of us? I have some things I want to talk to you about.”
She nodded with a resigned, closed-mouth smile. She knew exactly what I wanted to talk to her about. “Absolutely. Let me get Molly squared away with all of this, and we can meet down in the bar.”
“Aw, why can’t I come?” Molly demanded in the most petulant teen voice I’d ever heard. Well, since I’d been a teenager.
“Because you need to get off your feet,” Sasha told her sternly. “Besides, you’ve had Sophie all to yourself today. Let me have a chance to visit with her.”
“Fine.” Molly started to leave, her arms crossed over her chest. Then, she stopped and turned back to hug me. “Promise you won’t go back to New York without saying goodbye?”
“I promise. I’ll see you tomorrow after I go to the doctor, okay?” I squeezed her tight. What if I could just scoop her up and run away with her, abduct her back to New York and—
Yikes. Was I seriously considering kidnapping? I needed to get a grip.
I watched her head off, directing the bellman where to go. Sasha stayed with me. “All right. I’ll meet you down here in a half hour,” she said grimly. “And we can talk about your father.”