PART 1 — WHITE LILIES
The drive out to Sparrow Lane always feels longer than it is.
The lilies were on the passenger seat, white, wrapped in that stiff paper florists use, sliding a little on the turns. I had a gift box in the footwell. I had spent forty minutes in a shop choosing a scarf for a woman who has never once thanked me for anything.
Fletcher had laughed at me that morning on the phone.
“You’re actually going. On her birthday.”
“She’s the woman who adopted us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what she is.”
He was not wrong and I did not argue, because thirty-one years has taught me that my brother is usually right and usually says it once and then leaves you to it.
We were three when Wanda and Perry Kessick took us in. Twins. There is a photograph from that first month — two small boys on a green couch, both in corduroy, both looking at something off to the left.
We were told our birth mother left and never looked back. That sentence went in early and it set like concrete.
Perry was the good weather.
He sat in the front row at every school play, every band concert, every awful fourth-grade recorder assembly, and he clapped louder than anybody in the building, which mortified us and which I would give a great deal to hear again. He filled our room with model kits. He bought us two identical bikes one Christmas and could not stop grinning.
“You two are my whole world,” he used to say. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
Wanda was the other thing.
“You should be grateful we even took you in,” she’d say, over a dish left in the sink. “You’d be rotting in an orphanage if it weren’t for us.”
Fletcher went quiet. That was his method and he still has it; my brother can go silent in a way that empties a room.
I went the other direction. I apologized. I apologized for eleven years about everything, and I am thirty-one and in therapy about it and making progress.
Perry died when we were ten. His heart, at forty-one, in the driveway, on a Sunday.
My adoptive mother spent twenty-eight years telling my brother and me how grateful we should be that she took us in. On her sixtieth birthday I let myself into her house with flowers — and heard her laughing in the kitchen about how we had believed every word she ever told us.
