Chapter 1: Lucky
“You’re lucky anybody wanted you,” my mother said, and tore the box in half.
It was a DNA kit. Fifty-nine dollars, from the drugstore, with a cartoon double helix on the front. My friend Rosa from the diner had given it to me that morning, wrapped in a napkin, because it was my twenty-sixth birthday and she knew nobody at home would remember.
I’d made the mistake of leaving it on the kitchen counter while I changed out of my uniform.
“Mom. It’s just for fun. It tells you if you’re Irish.”
“You’re a Dempsey,” Lorraine said. She dropped the two halves of the box into the trash under the sink and pushed the cabinet shut with her knee. “That’s all you need to know. Twenty-six years we fed you. Clothed you. And this is how you say thank you? Going looking for somebody better?”
My sister Kayla was leaning on the counter by the fridge, scrolling through her phone in a white blazer she’d bought with a credit card in my name.
“Oh my God, Mara, is that why you were in such a good mood?” She laughed. “Like some rich family’s going to pop up and claim you?”
I’d been adopted at six weeks old. I’d always known. My parents had told me the story so many times it had worn grooves: Lorraine’s sister Darlene was a nurse in San Diego, and a girl had left a baby at the hospital, and Darlene had called and said, Lorrie, you’ve always wanted a girl. Two years later, Lorraine got pregnant with Kayla. “Our miracle,” she called her. She never called me anything.
I’d started working at fourteen. Bagging groceries, then waitressing at the Starlite Diner off Highway 99 in Bakersfield. Every paycheck went into the “family account.” That’s what Lorraine called it. I got forty dollars a week for gas.
When I was eighteen, I got into UC Davis. Lorraine said the family couldn’t spare me. I’d been saving for six years to go at night, a little at a time, into a separate savings account with my name on it.
“By the way,” Kayla said, without looking up, “Mom already spent your college fund on my wedding.”
I turned to Lorraine. She didn’t even pretend.
“Kayla’s getting married in May,” she said. “To a dentist. What were you going to do with eleven thousand dollars? Take night classes?” She said it the way other people say eat garbage.
“That was mine.”
“Nothing in this house is yours, Mara. We took you in. You owe us.”
My adoptive father, Gary, was sitting at the end of the table with his reading glasses on, doing a crossword. He didn’t look up. He never did. Twenty-six years, and the most he’d ever said in my defense was “Lorrie, that’s enough,” once, when I was nine.
He turned a page.
That night, after my double shift, I fished the DNA kit out of the trash. The tube was still sealed inside the torn cardboard. I spat into it in the bathroom at the diner, sealed it in the prepaid envelope, and mailed it from the blue box outside the post office on Truxtun Avenue.
I don’t know why. Maybe because it was the first thing anyone had given me in years that Lorraine hadn’t taken.
I forgot about it. Life went on. I worked doubles. Kayla tried on wedding dresses and sent pictures to the family group chat. I paid the electric bill.
Seven weeks later, at 2:14 in the morning, I was sitting in my car in the diner parking lot, too tired to turn the key, when my phone buzzed with an email.
Your DNA results are ready! You have 1 new close family match.
I opened it, expecting a third cousin in Ohio.
Charles E. Halloway. Predicted relationship: Parent / Child. Shared DNA: 50.1%.
There was a small gray placeholder where a profile photo should have been.
I typed the name into my phone with shaking fingers.
The first result was a Forbes page. Charles Halloway. Chairman, Halloway Pharmaceuticals. Net worth: $8.4 billion.
The second result was a Los Angeles Times article from 1999.
Infant Daughter of Pharmaceutical Heir Taken From San Diego Hospital Nursery.
