The Office of Historical Corrections(21)

“How are you doing?” I asked her once we’d gotten back from the airport and settled her into my apartment.

“How do you think?” she asked.

I offered to sleep on the couch and give her the bedroom, but she refused, and most nights passed out on the couch by ten, after watching syndicated sitcoms and having two glasses of wine. When I’d imagined her having more time for normalcy when the case was over, I hadn’t imagined this. Nothing I suggested excited or distracted her. When pressed, she made increasingly bizarre plans for the future. She was moving in with me, never mind that she had a house full of things on the other side of the country. She was moving to France, never mind that she didn’t speak French. She was joining the Peace Corps, never mind that she was in her late forties and had never so much as been camping because she didn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily separate themselves from reliable indoor plumbing.

It was probably my mother’s focus on unlikely and unreasonable futures that gave me the idea that I could still fix something for her. I found Nancy Morton, who was technically my mother’s first cousin, and, besides me, her last living relative. Nancy was Charlie Sullivan’s granddaughter too, and my mother had not seen her since his funeral. The family’s failure to bridge their divide in her generation was on her list of ways Papa’s legacy was being dishonored.

I’d already made arrangements with Nancy and booked the boat tickets by the time I explained the plan to my mother. She was wary. She had tried to reach out to her cousins when the litigation first began and her letter had come back marked return to sender from the address she had for Nancy’s older brother.

“They’re still your family,” I insisted.

“They are not my family,” my mother said. “We’re just related.”

I’d finally convinced her that the whole trip was what her grandfather would have wanted for us, because I had her own words on my side. Almost immediately, I had doubts about the brilliance of my plan, but it was too late. I’d invited a group of practical strangers to meet us on a boat, and now here we were—instant family, just add water.



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It was uncharacteristically hot for the Bay Area in August. The air felt thick and stifling like the East Coast summers I had left behind. Nancy Morton kept pulling an economy-size bottle of sunscreen out of her giant straw handbag and slathering gobs of it on her already reddening skin. Her husband, Ken, kept staring at his sneakers. He had barely spoken since we’d all done handshakes and introductions at the pier. Actually, he had spoken exactly six words since then, those words being “Kelli, put your damn clothes on,” when their younger daughter had taken off her damp T-shirt and begun walking around in her bikini top. Their older daughter, Sarah, was twenty-three—we shared a birthday, though a year apart—and looked as embarrassed by her family as I was.

This was only the third time that my mother and Nancy had seen each other. When they were small children, Nancy and her brother had been brought to their grandparents’ house for monthly visits, on the condition that my mother was out of the house. By six, my mother understood that she was Black and her family was not, and this was why the rule existed, but her understanding was impersonal and matter-of-fact; it was a rule like gravity, one from a higher authority. From the window of the neighbor’s apartment where she’d been sent, my mother could see Nancy on the front steps of their grandparents’ building. She was a small girl with a long blond braid hanging down her back; it brushed against the dingy ground as Nancy did her best to flatten a series of bottle caps with a rock. My mother was generally obedient, but her curiosity and her nagging sense that other children weren’t sent away when their families came by got the best of her; while the neighbor who was supposed to be keeping an eye on her watched her stories in the bedroom, my mother went downstairs and peeked through the glass of the front door to get a better look at Nancy, who finally looked up and pressed her face against the other side of the glass to look back. My mother opened the door.

“Why were you watching me?” Nancy asked.

“We’re cousins,” said my mother. “And your hair looks pretend.”

“Is not,” said Nancy. “And I don’t have cousins.”

“Do too. I live here. With our Grammy and Papa.”

The names meant nothing to Nancy, who called them Grandpa and Grandma Sullivan, but my mother offered as evidence the locket around her neck, the one with her grandparents’ pictures sealed in it. It was convincing enough for Nancy, who shrieked and hugged her. Nancy offered her a flattened bottle cap, and when my mother said it looked like a coin, they got the idea to play store, make-believe buying and selling flowers and dirt from the backyard and the clothing and jewelry they were wearing. They were absorbed enough not to notice that Nancy’s parents had emerged from the apartment and were on their way out until after Nancy’s mother opened the front door and saw them playing together.

She screamed her daughter’s name and grabbed Nancy by her pigtail, pulling her by her hair down the block to their car, Nancy’s neck straining unnaturally backward the whole way. My mother, afraid Nancy’s mother would come back for it, clutched the bottle cap in her hand so tightly that it sliced her skin. Nancy cried hysterically as her mother shoved her into the back seat and slammed the door, without a word to or from her husband, who took his son’s hand, followed his wife and screaming daughter to the car, and started the engine without so much as saying goodbye. My mother watched them drive away like that, her own palm still bleeding. Nancy’s tear-streaked face was pressed against the rear window. It was the last time her uncle brought his family over, the last time my mother saw him aside from his parents’ funerals. For years she told and retold Papa the story of the game, as if she could find the detail that had made it go wrong, until she was old enough to understand that she was the detail, the wrong thing. Someday, Papa told her, all this foolishness will be done, and all my grandchildren and their children will celebrate together. But whatever it would take to make someday happen, it did not seem to be happening in her house.