One Cold Night

opened three years ago. The big plate-glass window was framed in dark wood and decorated for autumn with toasty leaves and berried branches. Pressing her face against the glass, Lisa could see that the wooden shelving to the right of the door was starting to fill with dark-chocolate apples and milk-chocolate pumpkins and white-chocolate ghosts. Frosty orange ribbons closed the cellophane packages. Lisa felt a pang; she missed this, and she wasn’t even gone.
    All last summer she had worked here with Susan, helping out in the front of the shop or in the adjoining factory. The whole staff had treated her so nicely, taking the time to teach her the littlest things. She would sing for them sometimes, just to make sure they understood she would not be spending her life working in a store. But the truth was, deep down, she really liked it there. She liked the people who worked for Susan, and she liked the cozy feel of the shop, and she liked the factory’s cold steel tables and huge porcelain machinery and neatly stacked molds. And she had come to love the smell, that burned espresso smell of good chocolate. She was addicted to it now. She could almost smell it right here, standing outside the shop.
    If Susan was fifteen when she gave birth, then she was only a year older than Lisa was now. Lisa knew she had been awful to insinuate that Susan hadn’t known her baby’s father. Lisa’s father. Knowing Susan, it would have been a case of true love. Or maybe it was someone Mommy and Daddy didn’t like. Or maybe both. Lisa began to wonder about the story there. Maybe Susan was the very mother Lisa had always imagined, just a different version of her; maybe she had been at the epicenter of a drama. It occurred to Lisa that Susan might have aborted her; that was what all Lisa’s friends vowed they would do if it ever happened to them. Which it wouldn’t, because they were virgins, but still. There was a big difference between fourteen and fifteen years old, fifteen and sixteen, sixteen and thirty. Anything could happen.
    Maybe what Susan had been, way back then, was very brave.
    Maybe Mommy and Daddy had been brave, too.
    Maybe the thing to do was to give them all a chance to explain.
    Maybe Susan’s being her birth mother was a stroke of brilliant good luck. Because it meant that never, ever in Lisa’s lifetime had she been unwanted. Not for a single moment.
    Lisa sat on the curb in front of the shop, hugging her bent legs against her chest, drying her eyes on the knees of her jeans. She had always loved Susan, loved her.
    So, it was Susan. Susan.
    Did that mean Lisa would no longer need Mommy and Daddy’s permission for things in advance? Did it mean she could consult Susan as the last word on... well, whatever? A little thrill zipped through Lisa at the thought of the tattoo she’d been wanting to get at the base of her spine: a tiny starburst. She’d have a better chance with Susan, she realized, than with Mommy and Daddy. But it was confusing; weren’t they still her parents? Or would they now be expected to turn over the controls to their own daughter? To Susan? After all they had done for her and Lisa?
    Lisa pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and tried to shake her head free of the questions she couldn’t answer. Footsteps clopped along the cobblestones: A group of five women came laughing up Main Street and turned left onto Water, in the opposite direction, toward the subway. Then Lisa was alone again. It was creepy out here on the street, all by herself. She stood up and thought that maybe it was time to go home and face Susan, who had probably left a dozen messages on Lisa’s voice mail by now.
    Then, just as Lisa thought she’d head back, she noticed something: the curb in front of Susan’s parking garage was the same motley gray it had been all year. Dave had not kept his promise. He had not painted the yellow line.
    Lisa found the store key on her key ring, which she kept in her pocket. She rolled up the gate, then let herself in, turning off the alarm system with the code she had memorized last summer. She flicked on the lights and saw a huge smiling chocolate pumpkin on an ornate metal stand. It was a masterpiece, with all the lumpy texture of a real pumpkin, jaunty stem and all. His eyes were stars and his nose was a fancy triangle. His mouth was an ecstatic curlicue smile. A white paper tag showed a hefty price, and Lisa wondered who would get Susan’s first grand Halloween creation