Birthright

birthday, especially for a girl. Young woman now, I know. My little girl is a young woman.
    You’re beautiful, I know that, too.
    I look at young women your age, and I think, oh, how lovely and bright and fresh they are. How thrilling it is for them to be on the brink of so much. And how frustrating and difficult.
    So many emotions, so many needs and doubts. So much that’s brand-new. I think about what I’d like to say to you. The talks we might have about your life and where you want it to go. The boys you like, and the dates you’ve gone on.
    I know we’d quarrel. Mothers and daughters are bound to quarrel. I’d give anything just to be able to fight with you, have you storm up to your room and slam the door. Shut me out and turn your music up to annoy me.
    I would give anything for that.
    I think how we’d go shopping, and spend too much money, and have a ladies’ lunch somewhere.
    I wonder if you’d be proud of me. I hope so. Imagine Suzanne Cullen, businesswoman. It still amazes me, but I hope you’d be proud that I have a business of my own, a successful one.
    I wonder if you’ve seen my picture in a magazine while you’re waiting for a dentist appointment or to have your hair done. I think about you opening a bag of my cookies, and what sort you like the best.
    I try not to grieve, but it’s hard, it’s so hard knowing you might do these things and you’d never know who I am. You’d never know how much I love you.
    Every day and every night, Jessie. You’re in my thoughts, my prayers, my dreams. I miss you.
    I love you.
    Mom
    “This is hard for you. I can’t imagine how hard.” Jake lowered the letter and looked at her. “I’ve been caught up in patterns and data, facts and connections. And I tend to forget how all this makes you feel.”
    “What year was that?”
    “You were sixteen.”
    “Sixteen years. She didn’t know, not for certain, what I looked like. She didn’t know what I’d become, what I’d done, where I was. But she loved me. Not just the baby she’d lost, but whoever I was. It didn’t matter. She loved me anyway, enough to write that. Enough to give it to me, to give all those letters to me so I’d know I was loved.”
    “Knowing you can’t love her back.”
    “Knowing I can’t love her back,” Callie agreed. “Not this way. Because I have a mother who I did all the things with that Suzanne wrote of wanting to do with me. I had a mother who told me she loved me, who showed me. A mother I went shopping with, and argued with, and thought was too strict or too stupid, and all the things teenage girls think their mothers are.”
    She shook her head. “What I’m trying to say is my mother could have written that. Vivian Dunbrook could have written that kind of letter to me. Those emotions, those needs, that kindness, it’s in both of them.
    “I already have some of the answers. I know where I come from. I know I was blessed with both the heredity and the environment that allowed me to be what I am. I know I owe two sets of parents, even if I can only love one set without reservations. And I know I can get through this. Through the emotional turmoil, the anxiety, the digging through facts to find more facts. Because the time line isn’t finished until I can give the woman who wrote that letter the rest of the answers.”

Twenty-one
    L ana knew there were women who worked successfully out of the home. They ran businesses, created empires and managed to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted children who went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard or became world-renowned concert pianists. Possibly both.
    These women accomplished all this while cooking gourmet meals, furnishing their home with Italian antiques, giving clever, intelligent interviews with Money magazine and People, and maintaining a brilliant marriage with an active, enviable sex life and never tipping the scales at an ounce over their ideal weight.
    They gave smart, intimate dinner parties and served on the boards of several charitable organizations and were unanimously voted in as president of the PTA.
    She knew those women were out there. If she’d had a gun, she’d have hunted every last one of them down and shot them like rabid dogs for the good of womankind.
    She was still wearing the boxers and T-shirt she’d slept in, was limping from the lightsaber wound on her heel she incurred when she stepped on the action figure of AnakinSkywalker while chasing the dog—who’d decided her