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about you, Nicole, however much that may surprise you.”
    I felt appropriately chastised, realizing that in the short time I’d been home, I’d made more than one false assumption regarding her intentions. But I was a little annoyed myself, feeling once again that I had to drag what my mother was thinking from her.
    When she didn’t go on, I asked, “Then who were you talking about?”
    Placing her elbows on the table, she let her forehead fall against folded hands. “Me,” she said. The sound was more a breath than a word.
    It was my turn to look bewildered. “What about you?”
    She didn’t look up, but instead spoke to the surface of the table as though it were a priest to whom she was making confession. “My abortion.” If her voice had been any quieter I wouldn’t have heard her at all.
    My jaw dropped. “What? When?”
    “You were six months old. I didn’t think I could have another child so soon … ” She trailed off, then took another deep breath before continuing, still not looking at me. “You think you’re sticky with guilt.” With this, she lifted her gaze to me, her thin lips pressed into a grim line.
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “So you don’t want Jenny to have an abortion because you feel guilty about yours?”Her reluctance made a little more sense now, though I wasn’t sure if it justified putting my sister through the strain of pregnancy and childbirth.
    She shook her head. “No. But what if she feels the same connection to her baby that I felt to mine when it was still inside me?” She swallowed. “Before I killed it.”
    “You didn’t kill it, Mom.” I recognized my own melodramatic nature in her words and had the sudden urge to shower in order to wash off the similarity.
    Her dark head bobbed insistently. “Yes, I did. I felt that baby’s life inside me the same way I felt your life inside me, and I made the decision to end it.” Her green eyes were pleading. “If Jenny has any sense of that baby’s life, I will not be the one to take it from her.”
    We were quiet for a moment, both absorbed in our separate thoughts. I considered the significance of what she had revealed. “Okay,” I said. “But why didn’t you just tell me this at the hospital?”
    “We’ve barely spoken for ten years,” she said flatly, her eyes dark with restrained emotion. “The fact that you had an abortion isn’t exactly something you share with a casual acquaintance. Even if she is your daughter.”
    It seemed I wasn’t the only person at the table capable of cruelty. My bottom lip quivered unexpectedly at the severity of her words, and as I averted my eyes from her gaze, I found myself having to blink back an onslaught of tears. I stared hard at the yellow birdhouse-patterned wallpaper that had hung in this kitchen for as long as I could remember.
    She was right, of course. We were hardly more than strangers. And suddenly I realized how terrible that was, how much I had missed having her in my life. I felt her eyes on me, expectant, but I still couldn’t look at her. I certainly wasn’t prepared to sharewhat I was feeling, so I decided instead to try to set aside the issues we had with each other in order to figure out what was best for Jenny. “So, okay,” I said, finally. “Jenny is going to have this baby.” I paused, turning my head to look at her. “Then she should come home.”
    She leaned back against her chair. Sighing, she tucked her hair behind both ears and held her hands there as though she didn’t want to hear any more. “I have to work, Nicole. I couldn’t do it.”
    “But you wouldn’t be doing it,” I said stubbornly, crossing my arms over my chest. “I would.” I swung one arm around the room in a wide circle. “She knows this house. It’s still set up for her: the bathroom, her bedroom, the ramp on the back porch. You wouldn’t have to do anything. I’d do it all.” My voice shook under the weight of this promise, unsure whether I