Read Epic for Free Online Page A

that would confuse you as you got older, and I couldn’t disagree. My life was not fit for a baby.”
    “Why not?” I asked before I could stop myself.
    She laughed as she reached for a coffee mug. “I honestly never thought I’d be a mother. When Joey and I met, it was in a group home in Jersey. We became friends. Closer than friends. We were soul mates.”
    I tried not to let my mouth gape open. “You… loved him?”
    Years melted from her face as she thought back to my father. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Very much.”
    “Why did he marry my moth- … someone else?”
    She set her cup back down. “Life was hard for us in Jersey,” she confided. We ended up running away from the home by the time we were sixteen. We spent the next two years trying to figure things out. What did we know? We were just kids. We made a lot of mistakes. We fought a lot. We loved a lot. Mostly we just tried to hang onto the one thing in our world that was constant: one another. By the time we were eighteen we ended up in Iowa, when we tracked down some of his relatives. That’s where he met Marianne. She was so far different than the life we knew. She was beautiful,” she said, as if it made Marianne more valuable. “And she’d been turned out by her folks when she was only seventeen. But she wasn’t like me. She was delicate… fragile. And Joey wanted to be her hero. Before long he had fallen head over heels in love. Apparently she was a happily ever after I just couldn’t provide. I was drinking by then,” she offered as she hid her eyes in shame. “And Marianne was so active in the church and in her school. I wouldn’t have chosen me, either.”
    I gulped a knot down my throat. Little did she know how duped Joe had been.
    Maya pulled herself with difficulty into a standing position. “We stayed friends because that’s what you do. You hold onto the people you belong to, sometimes even after the relationship has ended. We were home to each other, or at least he had been home to me. And he never turned his back on me, even after they married. I tried to stay out of their business as much as possible, especially when they started having trouble conceiving. It was such a strain on Joey, who would come to my house and lean on my shoulder. He was too afraid to show her how disappointed he was. He never wanted her to feel guilty just because nature was working against them. So I offered to carry a baby for them. Well,” she added, “for him.”
    I shook my head. “How could… how did…?”
    “Well, obviously we didn’t have the money to do it the scientific way. But Marianne wanted to see him as happy as I did. And I got the impression she was relieved that she wouldn’t have to go through the pregnancy in any aspect. I was pregnant within six months.” Her eyes grew dreamy again. “It was the most magical time of my life,” she admitted. “He was so gentle. So loving. So patient. So unlike anyone I had ever known, before or since.”
    She lit up when she talked about my Dad, and i t made me sad for her, sadder still that Marianne had manipulated him into a marriage and ruined their one and only chance to be together.
    “The pregnancy was uneventful. I gave up drinking and cigarettes and Joey always made sure I had the right diet and medical care.” She gave me a gentle smile. “He was taking care of you before you were even born. He loved you so much. He wanted you so much. And when you were born he wept true tears of joy. So even though it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, I signed away my parental rights and handed you to your new mother.”
    Little did she know… little had any of us known.
    “I thought it would be easy,” she said as she pulled a photo album from the built-in bookshelf. “I never wanted to be a mother because I didn’t know the first thing about it. More than anything I never wanted one of my kids to end up in a home because I was completely incapable of being a