The Richest Woman in Town Claimed Me as Her Lost Daughter on Stage, Then I Read the Date on Her Lab Report novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Date on the Seal
Barbara Chalmers announces on a live microphone that a lab report proves Hallie is her lost daughter, and Hallie asks to see the date on the seal.
Barbara Chalmers read my mother's name off a lab report into a live microphone, and the line for pancakes stopped moving.
Four hundred people had come to the Armory for the Founders' Day breakfast.
Now none of them were eating.
My mother, Peggy Weber, stood behind the center griddle in a hairnet, holding a spatula over eleven pancakes.
She had flipped pancakes at this breakfast for nineteen years, and nobody had ever announced her.
"Margaret Weber, of Putnam Street," Barbara said, "who raised this girl with so much love."
She looked up from the page and smiled at the room.
"And who, I know, will want what's best for her."
I was standing by the coffee urns in the green dress Barbara had told me to wear.
She had called me Friday afternoon at the library, in the voice she uses on donors.
"Wear the green, honey. It's just a little surprise for the town. Nothing to worry about."
I had thought they were giving me a plaque for the summer reading program.
Barbara turned the page, and the microphone caught the paper.
"Twenty-seven years ago this April, two baby girls were born at our river hospital on the same night."
"A mistake was made. It was nobody's fault, and it has taken all this time to put right."
Somebody near the syrup said, "Oh my God," very softly.
The Marietta Times photographer had crouched at the foot of the stage, and his flash went off on every sentence.
"This lab report proves it," Barbara said. "Hallie Weber is my daughter."
The crowd made a sound I had never heard four hundred people make.
It was half a gasp and half a cheer.
Then the applause started, and it was the worst thing I have ever heard.
My mother's spatula stayed in the air.
A pancake began to burn.
Tom Muller, who ran the next griddle for the fire department, slid it off without looking at it.
He was watching my mother's face.
I looked for the other person who ought to be in this scene.
Lindsey Chalmers stood at the end of the stage, in a gray blazer, with her hands folded in front of her.
Barbara had raised her in the big house on Fairview Hill for twenty-seven years.
Nobody in the room was looking at her.
She wasn't clapping.
She was staring at the papers in her mother's hand.
Beside her, Ray Chalmers had his mouth a little open.
He is a big, gentle, white-haired man.
He looked like someone watching a surprise party for a stranger.
He hadn't known either.
"Hallie, sweetheart, come up here," Barbara said, and she held out her arm.
Four hundred heads turned around to find me.
I thought about the Friday phone call, and the way she'd said nothing to worry about.
I thought about the summer I was sixteen, when Barbara got me my first job.
I thought about the scholarship with her foundation's name on it, and every Christmas card since.
She had always been so kind to me.
I had never once asked why.
My mother looked across the Armory and found my eyes.
She didn't shake her head, and she didn't nod.
She just looked at me the way she does when I'm at the edge of something.
She had decided to let me do it myself.
So I walked up the steps.
Barbara's perfume closed around me, gardenias and money, and her arm settled across my back.
"Smile for the paper," she whispered. "Then we'll go somewhere quiet."
"May I see it?" I said.
She blinked.
"The report. Please."
I think she expected me to cry.
She laughed, warm and pleased for the room, and she put the stapled pages in my hand.
"Of course, honey. Take your time."
The first page was a letterhead from a lab in Columbus, and a table of numbers that meant nothing to me.
The second page was my mother's name, typed, and a line that said Weber, infant female.
I work in a library.
I read the last page of everything first.
I turned to page four, where the lab's embossed seal sat under a signature.
I pressed my thumb over the raised letters.
"Mrs. Chalmers," I said, into the open microphone, "you told everyone this came back this week."
"It did, sweetheart."
Her smile didn't move.
It was a very good smile.
I turned the page to the crowd and read the date on the seal out loud, and it was eleven years old.
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