Looking for Jane (14)

Angela shuts the door behind her now, tosses her keys into the blown-glass bowl on the spindly wooden entryway table, and hangs her coat up in the closet. Swapping her slushy winter boots for slippers, she hangs her purse on a hook, fishes the envelope from its depths, then shuffles down the hall and into the living room.

“Hey-hey!” Tina calls. Steam is emanating from the kitchen doorway, and her face appears in the pass-through window out into the living room, pink with heat. “I’m making fresh pasta. Your wine’s on the table.”

Angela plants a kiss on her wife’s lips through the window. “I knew I married you for a reason.”

Tina smiles. “My pasta?”

“M-hm.”

“Well, I’m glad my good looks, charm, and exhaustive education haven’t gone to waste in attracting a mate.”

Angela laughs and kisses her again.

“Go sit, I just need to get the sauce simmering.”

“Thanks, T.”

“What’s that?” Tina nods at the envelope clutched in Angela’s hand.

“Something I want to talk to you about, actually. I’ll wait till you come out.”

“Everything okay?” Tina’s brow instantly crinkles underneath her short blond hair.

Angela nods. “Nothing to do with me. Don’t worry. I just want your advice on something.”

“Oh, okay. Good.” Her wife’s face muscles relax. They’ve both been on edge since the miscarriage. They’ve spent eighteen months and tens of thousands of dollars only to watch their dream of a family repeatedly slip through their fingers. Neither of them can handle any more bad news at the moment.

“I’ll be out in a sec.” Tina disappears back into a cloud of steam.

Angela wanders over to the couch and flops down in her spot at the end of the three-seater. Their black cat, Grizzly, slinks around the corner of the coffee table. He’s the size of a large raccoon, but nimbly hops up into her lap.

“Hey, Grizz.” Angela stokes his glossy fur in an absent sort of way as the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong harmonizing waft from the record player on the sideboard.

She picks up the envelope and slips the edge of it back and forth through her fingers, thinking. On the bus back from work she started having misgivings about opening the envelope and removing it from the shop. Which is silly, of course. It didn’t belong to the shop to begin with. And no, perhaps she shouldn’t have opened it, but it had been posted so long ago, and was clearly forgotten. Was she not doing the intended addressee, Nancy Mitchell, a service by opening it? If she hadn’t, it might never have been discovered at all, and this woman would never know that she was adopted. Angela sets the envelope down on the couch cushion beside her and picks up her wine glass with the other. She takes a sip and grimaces. It’s the fake wine she’s been drinking out of desperation since they first started their fertility journey. Her wife emerges from the kitchen, holding a glass of her own.

“I figured after last night, you might want to revert to the fake stuff,” Tina says, indicating Angela’s glass.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“How is it, anyway? Is it basically just grape juice?”

Angela stares into the red depths, considering. “It’s more like wine than grape juice, but more like vinegar than wine.”

Tina chuckles and settles herself down on the other end of the couch. Both women turn their bodies inward to face each other, knees tented in front of them, the toes of their matching slippers touching.

“How was your day?” Angela asks, stalling.

Tina takes a sip of her real merlot. Angela catches a whiff of it and her stomach churns. “Fine. Uneventful. Did some cleaning, got groceries. Prepped for lectures tomorrow. How was the store? Usual sleepy Sunday?”

Angela looks down into her glass, swills it in her hand like a gold prospector, hoping the right words will float to the surface. “Not quite.”

“Do tell.”

Angela isn’t sure how to begin, so she opts for fessing up. “I found a piece of mail that must have gone astray at some point, was never delivered to the person it was addressed to. The weird thing is, it was addressed to the shop. Well,” she corrects herself, “the address of the shop. But it was meant for someone named Nancy Mitchell.”

“Is that it?” Tina asks, pointing down at the envelope between them. “You opened it?”

“Yeah. I know. I feel weird about it. But the postmark said it was mailed in 2010 and it was buried in a box inside a drawer that no one’s opened for years. Aunt Jo never bothered to organize that place. It was never going to be found.”

“So what’s in it?”

Angela gives her wife a meaningful look over the top of her knees. “It’s a huge letter. It’s not long, but I mean the contents. It’s… heartbreaking.”

“What’s in it?” Tina asks again.

Angela removes the letter and the accompanying note from the envelope. She passes them to Tina, then reaches for her wine glass, taking another sip as Ella and Louis begin the chorus of “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” A few seconds later, Angela hears the hiss of water on the stovetop.

“Can you—”

“I’ll put the pasta in,” Angela says at the same moment. Tina smiles, and Angela walks into the kitchen. When she returns a minute later, Tina has finished reading.