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Neil cast me a sideways glance as he scraped radicchio off the cutting board and into a sauté pan. We’d decided to tell Mom about the kidney transplant, and that sooner would be better to do so, but this was our best opening, and neither of us were quite ready.
“Well, our friend, El-Mudad, visited, and…” I looked between the two of them. “I also saw my half-sister, Susan.”
Mom put down her phone, Vegas pictures forgotten. That made me feel bad. I would be sure to look at them properly after dinner. She looked shocked and surprisingly sad. “When did this happen?”
“She contacted Sophie while her husband was in town on business,” Neil explained for me. “We invited them to dinner.”
“How do you feel about that, Sophie?” Mom asked, reaching out to run her hand up and down my arm supportively.
I shrugged off her touch, trying too hard to seem totally okay. “Fine, really. We just had dinner and got to know each other. And we discussed my other sister. One of them.”
“Oh?” Mom’s expressions might as well have come with a vocal translation, because I could almost hear her lifted eyebrows asking, so you’re calling them that, now?
I pleaded with my eyes for Neil to take over.
“She’s… Was it sixteen, Sophie?” he asked then went on, “She has some kidney disease or other, and Sophie plans to see if she’s a suitable donor.”
There. He’d said it just as simply as it needed to be stated. No reason for hysterics. Just soap opera level drama at the Elwood house, like always. Nothing to see here.
“Your kidney?” Mom asked, and I braced myself for an explosion of outrage with anxiety shrapnel. I was sure she would tell me that I couldn’t put my life at risk for a stranger, or start detailing all kinds of issues donors had later in life. To my surprise, tears welled in her eyes, and she hugged me, almost violently. “I am so proud of you.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to proceed. I’d mentally rehearsed an entire speech about how it was my body and my choice, and how my conscience demanded I do it. I’d put in a lot of work on it just to see it go to waste. “I thought you were going to be mad at me.”
“Mad at you?” She thrust me out to arms’ length. “Why would I be mad?”
“Because kidney transplants are, like, big deal surgery. With risks and stuff?” Now, it was beginning to feel a little insulting that she wasn’t at least slightly worried.
She waved her hand like she was swatting a fly. “No, they do those all the time, now. It’s nothing. Especially for you. You’re young, you’re healthy, you’ll bounce right back.”
“Really?” She was only confirming what I’d read online already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by my mom. No matter how old I got, I trusted her word more than anyone else’s.
“Oh, yeah. Remember when I worked at the hospital?” she asked.
“Did they do kidney transplants in Calumet?” Neil asked, truly perplexed.
“No, but we raised money to send two nurses down to Ann Arbor to be part of a donation chain,” she explained. “Are you a match?”
“We don’t know, yet,” I admitted. “I haven’t had the test. And I haven’t told them I said yes.”
Mom frowned. “Why didn’t you tell them?”
“I needed time to think.” I still felt like I should apologize for that. “Because of all the stuff that goes along with this. It would almost be easier to donate to a total stranger. I’m not sure there’s ever going to be any family relationship between me and them.”
“That’s just stupid,” Mom pronounced. “If you’re related enough to have matching organs, you’re related enough to be a family. That’s how you were raised.”
“It’s not me that’s the problem.” Then, I felt the need to defend Susan a little. “My sisters”—still weird—“didn’t even know I existed until recently. And they never planned to meet me.”
“But they’re fine taking your kidney?” Mom’s support for the transplant vanished in a puff of maternal defensiveness. “You’re just not good enough to be part of the family?”
“I don’t think it’s that,” I said. Not rolling my eyes was a Herculean effort. “It’s complicated.”
“And probably not something any of us could understand,” Neil put in. He pulled the kitchen towel from his shoulder and wrapped it around his hand to take the handle of one of the pans and shift it from the heat. “Not without going through it ourselves.”
“So, from what I’m hearing, this transplant thing isn’t set in stone?” Tony asked, clearly laying the groundwork to calming my mother down when she went nuclear in private later.
“Right. It’s not official. I’ve just made my decision. At this point, we don’t even know for sure that I’m a match.” There. I hoped that would help him when he had to run interference for me.
