They Said I Was Adopted, but I Was Always the Real Daughter novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: The Handbag
"Not here," my mother said again.
She said it quietly, but the cafeteria was small and half full, and a nurse at the next table looked up from her tray.
"Why not here?" I asked. "It's a good place. There are witnesses."
"Inés, you're ill and you're upset."
"I'm neither. I'm very calm. Dad just told me I was born at ten past three in a thunderstorm."
My mother's eyes flicked to my father.
I watched her decide something.
She sat down in the chair next to him, set her handbag on the table and folded her hands on top of it.
"Humberto is confused," she said to me, warmly, as if she were explaining a menu. "He hasn't slept. He loves you, and he feels guilty because we have been hard on you, and he's inventing a story to make it better. It happens in families when someone is sick."
"I'm not confused," my father said.
"You've been taking pills for your pressure."
"They don't make me forget my own daughter's birth."
"They make you foolish."
"Graciela."
"Lower your voice."
"No," my father said.
He said it so softly that for a moment I didn't realize what I'd heard.
Then he stood up.
He is a big man, heavy through the shoulders, and he had spent thirty years making himself smaller around my mother.
Now he stood at full height in a hospital cafeteria.
His glasses swung from their cord, and the room turned to look.
"She is our daughter," he said. He said it to my mother, and then he turned and said it to the room. "Inés is my daughter, and she is hers. I held her when she was ten minutes old. I should have said so eighteen years ago, and I'm saying it now in front of everyone."
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