You sent me that comic Dad drew in high school.” Randy had only been dead a couple of months before Jesse left for college. But the rift between him and the boy who looked so much like him had been in place long before that. They’d just been so completely different….
“I took some things to Gram one day, too, some old pictures. And after seeing them, she brought up a box from her cellar and gave it to me.”
“What was in it?”
Caroline gave a shove against the ground, scraped the almost threadbare fabric of her jeans with one finger, willing her queasy stomach to calm. “She wouldn’t tell me, wouldn’t let me look until I got home, wouldn’t talk about it at all. It was little—an old stationery box.” It had pink roses all over it. Caroline couldn’t imagine her mother ever having written a letter on a piece of paper covered with pink roses.
“So what was in it?” Jesse’s voice was quiet now. But it still sounded as though he was waiting to take charge.
“A letter. And a ring.”
Glancing at the bare hand growing pink with cold, Caroline studied the ring she’d worn since that day—although normally, when she was with other people, it was on a chain around her neck.
“It’s the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’ve ever seen,” she told her son. “A sapphire. Set in gold.”
“Where’d it come from?” Jesse asked. And then, before she could answer, he burst out, “If it’s so great, why did Gram have it stuffed away in some old box in the basement?”
“The letter—and ring—were from my birth mother.” Caroline blinked as her eyes blurred, still staring at that ring. Jesse was going to think her a fool. Her father—and Randy’s—would surely agree with him. And maybe she was.
Still…
“Who was she? Some teenager who got knocked up?”
“Jesse Randall Prater!” Caroline’s cold cheeks burned, every nerve beneath her skin tensing. Did her son think of her with that same disrespect?
And if so, God help her, what would he think of her now?
“Well, isn’t that why you had me, Ma? Because you knew what it felt like to be given away and you couldn’t bear to do that to anyone else?”
She’d forgotten he knew that. It wasn’t a part of her life that she talked about—it wasn’t part of the reason she normally gave. But once, when Jesse had been about fourteen, and his father had taken his own insecurities out on his son, leaving the child feeling insignificant and unwanted, she’d told him her secret. That she hadn’t just kept him because she’d loved his father and wanted to get married. Or because his maternal grandparents, who’d never been able to have children of their own, were fully supportive of their sixteen-year-old pregnant daughter, offering to help wherever they could to make it possible for her to keep her child. She’d kept him because she didn’t ever want him to feel unworthy of life’s basic necessities—food, shelter and unconditional love.
She’d never, for one second, regretted the decision. But there were times when being Jesse’s mother hurt. A lot.
“I’m sorry, Ma.” The apology came after only a minute of silence. She’d have waited ten if that was what it took. “You’re just freaking me out with all this going-away stuff.”
Jesse was scared. So was she. Terrified.
“My birth mother was well into her forties when she had me. My father was in his early fifties. She’d gone through menopause. They thought pregnancy was impossible.”
“Wow,” Jesse said softly. “You’d think, being that old, they’d have been able to provide for a kid.”
Pulling both knees to her chest, Caroline laid her head on them, the worn denim soft against her cheeks as she gazed out at the yard that had barely changed since she’d moved there at seventeen. The old red maple tree was bigger. But it had already been huge. They’d put up a new fence ten years before. And the mailbox had been replaced when the old one was knocked down by a snowplow when Jesse was still a toddler.
“They did provide for one,” she told her son. “They just couldn’t manage two.”
“Two!” His voice cracked. “You’re a twin?” She almost smiled. It hadn’t taken long for her genius son to figure that out.
“Yes.”
She really should go inside where it was warm. But it was so empty. Unless she counted the memories that wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Cool! Two Mas.” He sounded like he was grinning. Caroline was grateful for the diversion, even knowing it would be short-lived. “Wait. Was the other kid a girl or a boy?”
“A girl.”
“Were you identical?”
“No.” Not that the letter had said one way or the other. Caroline had found out for herself, from pictures in newspaper articles on the Internet about her very successful twin. Her mother had given her the box at the end of September and within a week she’d joined a couple of Internet tracking services and had a folder on her computer filled with information.
“Damn!” Jesse said, quickly adding, “Uh, darn—sorry, Ma.”
“You’re a freshman in college, Jess,” Caroline said, walking over to the porch rail, wondering how many more years it would stand up to Kentucky’s weather. “Certainly old enough to make your own vocabulary choices.”
“It’s just so fantastic.” His voice was more that of her intense little boy than the man he was quickly becoming. “I wonder how they chose which one of you to keep.”
“Birth order,” she told him. “They kept the first. I was born second.”
Silence fell on the line.
“This had to be pretty hard on you, huh?” he asked a moment later. “Here I am, going on like some kind of jerk, not even thinking how this must’ve made you feel. Being the one given away and all.”
“It’s okay, Jess,” she told him, hoping that someday the words would be true. “I’ve always known I was given away.”
“Yeah, but knowing that one was kept—”
A chill swept through Caroline. She brushed some twigs off the top of the chipped porch rail and wrapped her arms around her midriff.
“And there I go again, putting my foot right in it,” Jesse said, bringing a slow grin to his mother’s face.
“So…does this, uh, talk about Shelter whatever have to do with the letter?”
“Yes.” With the thumb of her left hand she reached for the sapphire on her ring finger. According to the letter from Caroline’s birth mother, her twin had been given a ring, too. An opal. Apparently their mother had liked jewelry. “Her name is Phyllis Langford Sheffield. She’s a professor of Psychology at Montford University in Shelter Valley.”
“She married?”
