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I slide the sheet of finished cake decorations into the freezer and stash the pies in the refrigerator. With the dessert completed, I tackle the finger sandwiches. At least Mom is serving something that I can make. At the last party she hosted, Mom had wanted to serve four different types of homemade pasta composed of things like spinach and pumpkin. Together, we mangled ravioli pouches and fettucine noodles for hours before I gave up and ran to Whole Foods for packaged pasta.
“Oh, champagne. Of course. We’ll serve mimosas, then. Do I have orange juice? Hara, you’ll need to stop and pick up champagne tomorrow after work. I have that cheap bottle from New Year’s and I can’t serve that to your dad’s old work colleagues.”
I decide to make these twenty-eight sandwiches and then confess. No, not confess, because that feels like I’ve done something wrong. It can’t be wrong to want to know more about my past—that yearning is normal. Even Boyoung, who has been arguing with me for the past week about being careful about strangers on the internet, isn’t against me connecting with my birth parent. She is concerned about me being ripped off. Understandable. A couple of days ago, she texted me a mass of Hangul with stern instructions to paste it into the reply section of the email. I didn’t, though. The machine translation made it sound like an angry rebuke along with a command to never contact me again.
Mom won’t think it’s a con artist, but she’ll be hurt. She’ll take this as a direct assault on her parenting, even though this isn’t a binary thing where if I go to Seoul to meet Lee Jonghyung then I’ll denounce Ellen Wilson.
“Mom, listen.”
“How many bottles of champagne do you think I should buy? Three? Or maybe two because Karen will bring a bottle of wine, don’t you think? She’s the type to bring wine everywhere. Macy might, too. She said she wanted to help out—”
“Mom—”
“Three is a good number. I’m bound to have guests over again, so if we don’t drink the three bottles I’ll be set for next time.”
Talking isn’t getting me anywhere. I abandon the sandwich assembly line and pluck the phone out of Mom’s hands.
She jerks to attention. “What is it?”
Of course, now that I have her attention, my courage falls somewhere around my knees. “I’m . . . I am . . .” I pause to clear my throat.
Mom’s forehead creases. “You’re not ill, are you?” Her hand comes up to rest against my cheek.
“No. It’s not that. It’s, well, I got this email, you see.” I reach around her and drag my purse across the counter. The folded email falls out.
Ellen looks at the paper and then at me. “What is this?” She doesn’t want to touch it, somehow sensing she’s not going to like the contents. I unfold it and hand it over.
She takes it reluctantly. The paper shakes a little as she brings it close enough to read. “Is this a time-share?” She tries to laugh. “You know those things are rip-offs.”
“No. It’s not a time-share,” I say softly. “It’s an email from my dad.”
“Pat?”
“No. My—” I almost say “real” but stop myself at the last second. “My bio dad.”
“The sperm donor?” Mom blurts out in shock. Her eyes quickly scan the document, stopping at the blue inked translation that I’d penned after my pizza dinner with Boyoung. Mom starts shaking her head. “No. No. This— You can’t.”
I press on. “I signed up for one of those adoption DNA matching services and I received this in return.”
Her lips thin. “Is this because your father died?” She lets the paper flutter back onto the counter and shoves by me. At the cutting board, she begins to slice the cucumbers into ragged, uneven bits. “You should get some counseling. You didn’t cry at the funeral. I know you don’t like crying, but it’s good to do sometimes. It gives you a”—Mom fists her hand in front of her chest—“a release. I’ve been thinking of going to therapy myself. We could go together.”
“It’s not because Dad died.” It was that he’d tried to make a new life without me; it was because of the email that I’d received; it was because I’ve never truly felt that I fit in here among everyone with their blond hair and their prominent brows and their high nose bridges, but I didn’t fit with the Asian crowd either. My shoes are either too tight or too loose, but I feel like there are answers somewhere in that small peninsula on the other side of the ocean. “I wonder things,” I finally say.
“What things? Why he abandoned you? There’s nothing to be curious about. You already have a father.” Mom stomps over to the counter and haphazardly throws the cucumbers down onto the bread I laid out earlier. “You don’t need to get in touch with this stranger. Besides, you know what happened to Nicki’s family. That was horrible. She went through so much trauma, and unnecessary trauma at that.”
