puts Olivia down. “But you know what the best present she’s ever received is?”
Olivia’s gappy smile widens. She’s been told this over and over.
“You,” Tom says, tickling her belly.
Olivia giggles. “Do you think the lady’s tummy I grew in will get a plaque?”
Tom catches his breath. “I don’t know.”
Tom and Elizabeth have been very open with Olivia about her adoption, always explaining to her in an age-appropriate way where she came from. They’ve told her over and over that they are her forever family and will always love her. Still, Olivia sometimes wonders about her birth mother.
I, too, have wondered about Olivia’s birth mom. What kind of person was she? How old was she? Where did she live?
“Let’s wrap mommy’s present and then we’ll go for ice cream like I promised.”
Elizabeth is working at the hospital this weekend and when it’s just Tom and Olivia on a Saturday night, they always go for ice cream. Olivia’s favorite is vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.
When I was in kindergarten, we made pictures with our handprints for Mother’s Day.
Miss Becky gave each of us a piece of white construction paper and told us to place our hand in the poster paint on the plate in the middle of the table then press it on the paper. After we washed our hands, we were to print our name and the year in our “very best printing”.
“But Sarah doesn’t have a mom,” Reid said, wiping his snotty nose on his shirt sleeve.
Reid always had a snotty nose. His shirt always looked as if it had snail tracks on it. I knew what snail tracks looked like because I’d seen them on our screen door at home.
Rachel put her hands on her hips and gave Reid her squinty I-going-to-punch-you-in-the-noggin look. “She has a grandma.”
“That doesn’t count. It’s not the same.”
Rachel raised her hand. “Miss Becky, can you tell Reid that Sarah can make a picture for her Grandma since she doesn’t have a mom.”
“That’s right, Reid. Sarah’s grandmother is her mom.”
“But my grandma’s not my mom. She’s my mom’s mom.”
Reid always was a smarty pants. That’s something that never changed. It only got worse the older he got. By the time we were in high school, I stopped being in his classes. He was always in classes with the super-smart kids. I wasn’t so smart. Or maybe I just didn’t try.
But Reid’s comments did make me wonder about my mom, sort of like Olivia wonders about her mom. Grandma said my mom loved me, but I could never figure out why Matt, if he loved my mom so much, didn’t love me.
I know she died when she had me, but Grandma always told me that my mom knew she was going to die. That she chose my life over hers. Grandma said Matt let anger eat away at him like a cancer. When Grandma got cancer, I saw just what she meant. The eating-away part, I mean.
“Daddy,” says Olivia, sitting in a booth at the ice-cream shop. “That boy scares me.”
She points to a red-haired boy about her age with big ears and a Band-Aid on his forehead sitting across from his dad.
Tom looks in the direction Olivia is pointing. “Why? He doesn’t look scary to me.”
“He has his dad’s eyes.”
“What?” Tom asks.
“The lady who gave him his ice cream said that he has his dad’s eyes. And she pointed to that man across from him. And if he has his dad’s eyes, then his dad doesn’t have any eyes.”
Tom laughs and tears pool in Olivia’s green eyes. “Oh, princess,” Tom says. “It’s not what you think. That little boy didn’t take his daddy’s eyes. His daddy still has his eyes. The lady meant that his eyes look like his daddy’s.”
Olivia breathes a sigh of relief. “Do I have your eyes?”
Tom runs his fingers through his hair. This is the second tough question of the night and I wonder how he’s going to answer. “No, you don’t have my eyes. But we see the same thing with our eyes.”
Olivia smiles. His answer satisfies her – for now.
I asked Grandma once if I had my mom’s eyes. I knew I had her blonde curly hair. Grandma had told me that. But I wondered about her eyes. We were studying dominant and recessive genes in high school and our assignment was to see how our eye color compared to our parents’. My dad had brown eyes and Grandma told me that my mom had green eyes. I was glad I ended up with my mom’s eye color. It was bad enough I had my dad’s dimples. I hated those dimples. I didn’t want to have anything of his. I had always planned to get my dimples fixed when I got older and could afford it. I had read in my teen magazine that you could get them fixed.
“But, Sarah,” Grandma said the day I told her how much I hated my dimples. “When you smile your dimples are like exclamation points.”
“It’s a birth defect, Grandma,” I said in my know-it-all-teen voice. “A defect just like Matt.”
Grandma cried when I said that. I was mean and I shouldn’t have been. But Matt was meaner and Grandma knew it. Even so, I think I broke her heart that day. She had dimples, too.
I look at Olivia. She has dimples, too, and I don’t think they look like a defect. I think they look cute, just as Grandma thought mine looked cute.
Ice cream drips from Olivia’s cone onto the red laminate tabletop.
“Lick around the edges,” Tom says, placing a couple more napkins in front of Olivia.
Tom finishes his dish of raspberry ice cream. Steam snakes upward as the waitress refills his white coffee mug. He picks it up and takes a sip. “So what movie do you want to watch when we get home?”
“Snow White.”
“Didn’t we watch that the last time Mommy worked?”
Olivia nods.
“And you want to watch it again?”
Olivia nods again, trying to lick her cone faster than it can melt. She has been on a Snow White kick lately.
“OK. We’ll watch Snow White, but maybe the next time we can watch something different.”
Olivia nods.
I know what it’s like to love a movie. I loved Bambi. It wasn’t one of Grandma’s favorites. I noticed that she always left the room when Bambi’s father told him that his mother couldn’t be with him anymore.
“That’s kind of like my mother,” I told Grandma the first time we watched the movie. Rachel had all of the Disney movies and let me borrow them.
Grandma put her hand to
