Page 42 of The Golden Spoon
“No, that never made any sense,” I protest.
“She was lazy. She didn’t want to work anymore, and she must not have wanted to be a mother anymore either.”
“No, she wouldn’t have left me. We were inseparable.” A bubbling hopelessness tears at my chest. A grief with nowhere to go, no marker or stone to lie at. It’s the feeling I’ve had for fifty-one years.
“Oh yes, you and Agnes were just the perfect pair, weren’t you?” Betsy’s voice drops to a snarl. “Always running around together, playing and giggling like you werebothchildren. It was unseemly, not how a mother and daughter should behave together.”
I realize when she says it that Betsy was jealous. All this time, I thought she’d looked down on us when she was secretly envious of our close relationship. The revelation stuns me and I am momentarily unable to speak.
“Frankly, I’m tired of this conversation.” Betsy folds her arms in front of her. “I think you should leave.”
“But I’ve waited so long to talk to you. I never got to come back, to retrace her last steps. I just need—”
“What? What do you need, Elizabeth?” Betsy snaps.
“I need closure.” I find myself growing angry.
“Closure?You did all this forclosure? Might have been easier to just find a therapist.”
I grip the back of the chair. How dare she treat me like I’m still a little girl who doesn’t deserve to be here. We are not children anymore.
I’ve given this bitter woman way too much power over me, and it is going to end now.
“I know about the recipes. I know that you stole them from Agnes to build your first cookbooks. Without my mother you would have been—”
There is a pounding of footsteps in the hallway, and Pradyumna bursts in through the double doors.
“Lottie!” I turn toward his voice as he rushes to the fireplace. Stella and Hannah crowd behind him, their eyes wide with fear.
Pradyumna reaches out to me. His hand is bound with a piece of newsprint that is dripping with blood. He holds something in it, a piece of paper.
“Pradyumna, are you okay?”
“Lottie, you have to see this!” he says, waving the document, a look of pure victory on his face.
“No!” Betsy cries, standing up and lunging for the document. “Where did you get that?”
But Pradyumna pulls it away from her, passing it over to me. I take hold of the paper, turning away from Betsy’s grabbing fingers. It is almost transparent in the flickering light. The wavy watermarks of a birth certificate visibly streak across its surface.
“It’s wrong,” Betsy says. “That isn’t real.”
The gold seal catches the firelight. It is all written there, stamped in the certain lines of a typewriter: my birthday, the eighth of June, 1952. Elizabeth Bunting Grafton. Born to Agnes Bunting and Richard M. Grafton. It is authorized with the doctor’s scrawling signature and an official seal.
“It can’t be,” I whisper. How had I never even considered the possibility? All those years, thinking I was the product of a random encounter, but it wasn’t like that. My father was here the whole time, right in front of me. Had he known? He must have. I think of all the interactions I’d had with Richard Grafton. He was kind to me always, but he hadn’t ever seemed like afather, certainly not my father.
Gerald steps forward. He has his phone with him and shines thelight up through the back of the birth certificate. “This kind of document is nearly impossible to replicate without extremely sophisticated equipment. Note the watermark. Therefore, it is my assessment that this document is original.”
“This is obviously a mistake.” Betsy’s voice is wavering, straining to remain calm. “Richard Grafton wasmyfather alone.”
“The birth certificate would say otherwise,” Pradyumna interjects.
I shake my head bitterly. “She’s right, Pradyumna. Why would I even want to be a Grafton? What did they ever do for me? If he was my father, he lied to me the whole time I knew him and then had me sent away.”
“My father was an angel. He treated all of you like gold, even your slut of a mother.” I reel back as though I’ve been slapped.
“How dare you talk about my mother like that?” I say through clenched teeth. “You owe her everything!”
“My career was hard earned.” Betsy’s calm is fracturing, but I can see through the cracks. She is not the only one losing her temper. I clench my hands, press my fingernails into my palms until they dig painful ridges in my palms. “So what if she scribbled some words on some cards? I did this! I built this!”
