“I’ll tell you what though,” Mom says. “I think I could use a stiff drink.”

*

Mom gets reckless over her second martini.

“It probably was a mistake, coming here…but Gillian, she’s my daughter. Even if she doesn’t feel that way right now.”

I nod, sip my own drink.

“Maybe we can all talk when Sam’s gone to bed,” I say, although I’m starting to doubt the wisdom of that, since Mom isn’t usually a two-martini lady and alcohol doesn’t necessarily help these kinds of situations.

Mom looks at me.

“It’s hard to imagine,” she says. “Lorna, being…sick. Being old. She was just a girl when I saw her. Eighteen! A child.” Mom shakes her head. “At your father’s funeral, when those flowers came, my heart just about stopped, you know. I didn’t think she’d have heard of his death; it was like getting a message from a ghost. And then I thought about how old she’d be by then—a woman in her mid-fifties! It seemed unthinkable.” She looks down into the bowl of her glass. “But still so young—much too young for something like this to be happening.”

The bartender—a young guy who looks like a student, probably barely ten years older than Sam—passes by and asks if we need anything. Mom looks doubtfully at her near-empty glass but shakes her head. I wait until he’s gone and ask Mom something else that’s been on my mind.

“Mom…why didn’t you and Dad stay in touch with Lorna? I get that you wanted the adoption to be secret. But couldn’t you have just kept in touch?”

Mom eyes me.

“Well, I don’t think she wanted to, Gillian. I suppose it was more comfortable for her, leaving everything behind. She was the one who ran off to I-don’t-know-where; Mexico I think it was, to begin with. And things were different then. People without a fixed address or a landline, well, you had to wait for them to contact you, you didn’t really have a way of reaching them.”

“But you liked it,” I say. “Her not being around. Right? Not having to think about her. Not having to worry about her ever being around Abigail.”

Mom flushes.

“I don’t think that’s very kind of you, Gillian.”

I finish the last of my drink.

I’m not sure that it was unkind. But I also feel that maybe the time for kindness in our family has passed—or a certain type of kindness at least. The type of kindness that keeps you from saying things you should have said long ago.