Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

all. It’s not something that concerns her. She’s always been more curious about Connie.”
    “Yeah,” he said numbly. “I guess you’re right.”

    Connie Bradshaw, Shawna’s birth mother, was a not-that-close friend of Mary Ann during high school days in Ohio. Connie had become a stewardess for United (back when there were still stewardesses) and was Mary Ann’s only contact in San Francisco when she defected from Cleveland. She crashed on Connie’s sofa bed in the Marina just long enough to get her bearings, and more than long enough to realize that her once envied classmate (a head majorette no less) was not quite as sophisticated as she’d remembered. Connie was a daffy, good-natured sleep-around. (Later, in fact, she would share an awkward one-night stand with Brian, before he finally hooked up with Mary Ann.) Mary Ann wanted no part of Connie’s free-range tackiness—not the Pet Rock or the plush python or the Aqua Velva she kept in the bathroom cabinet for the guys who slept over. She fled within the week, as impulsively as she had fled Cleveland.
    San Francisco, however, is basically a village, so Mary Ann never quite escaped Connie’s worshipful attention, especially as Mary Ann’s star began to rise. In a weak moment, during a chance meeting at the zoo, Mary Ann told Connie (then pregnant with Shawna by an undetermined father) that Brian wanted a baby but was shooting blanks. Connie never forgot this. Months later, as she lay dying on the delivery table, her blood having failed to clot, she bequeathed her newborn daughter to her famous classmate from Cleveland and a guy she’d mostly remembered as having once been sweet to her.
    When Connie’s brother delivered Shawna (literally) to the startled couple at 28 Barbary Lane he brought them a trunk of Connie’s treasures—her legacy as it were—a sad collection of dried corsages and pep buttons and yearbooks scrawled with smiley faces. Mary Ann waited until Shawna was five to open the trunk, an event that Shawna remembers as both tender and curiously momentous. Not a bad call, given the fact that Mary Ann left for New York only days later. I’ve often wondered if Mary Ann saw that little ritual as a moment of divestiture, a changing of the guard. Here’s your real mom, darling. She’s the one who deserves your love. She’s the one that you’ll be missing.
    As it happened, Shawna took Mary Ann’s departure rather well and began a serious fascination with Connie. Flight Attendant Barbie became the centerpiece of Shawna’s toy collection and was often drafted for theatrical extravaganzas requiring a mother figure. Before long I found myself being interrogated about a woman I’d met only once—when Brian brought her to one of Anna’s Christmas parties. I’d end up telling Shawna how pretty Connie was, and how nice, and how much genuine cheer she brought into a room. But the kid was no dummy and demanded more as she grew older. She was about twelve when she grilled me one afternoon on Heart’s Desire Beach, a tree-lined cove on Tomales Bay, where we’d settled with a picnic lunch. She waited until Brian was dog-paddling offshore before asking me if I’d ever met her “real dad.”
    I told her—coward that I am—that I’d always thought of Brian as her real dad.
    “The other one,” she said. “The one that got my real mom pregnant.”
    What was I supposed to say? “Well, no, honey…I never did.”
    Shawna dug in the sand with her toes, idly making a trench. “Do you know where she met him?”
    All I could remember from Mary Ann’s account was that Connie had narrowed Shawna’s paternity down to two “really nice guys.” Only one had come with an actual location, so that’s the one I went with. “I think it was the Us Festival.”
    “The what?”
    “It was sort of like Woodstock, I guess, but a lot more calculated and commercial.” (A few weeks earlier we had watched the Woodstock documentary on Brian’s VCR, so it made for an easy reference point.) “Was everybody naked?”
    I smiled, shaking my head. “This was the eighties. Things had changed by then. Your mom was probably wearing something shiny.”
    “Did she see him after that?”
    “I’m not really sure.” I smoothed a patch of sand with my palm, hoping we’d get the hell off this subject. “I just know where she met him.”
    There was a long uncomfortable silence, so we both gazed out at the water. While Brian splashed in the distance like a