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great writer, but I hadn’t read that much of him. Was I simply trying to contrast myself with her, to make her tastes seem philistine?
    â€œWhat else do you do?”
    â€œI play basketball,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought this up. Basketball was fine. I’d played in high school, and at Yale I’d spent a season on the junior varsity bench, getting beaten up under the boards during practice. I still played pick-up twice a week, but basketball wasn’t my life. It wasn’t the best way to describe myself.
    â€œYour birth father played basketball.”
    â€œHe did?”
    â€œI used to watch him on the playground after school.”
    His image came to me, this man whom for years I’d thought of as Abraham. Every Abe I’d met, every Abraham: I’d examined him as if for a mark, wondering whether he was related to me.
    â€œDid you love him?” I asked.
    Her eyes grew moist. “Very much.”
    â€œDidn’t he love you?”
    â€œFor a while he did. For a while we both loved each other.”
    â€œBut then?”
    She looked sadly at me. “Then we got older.”
    What, I wondered, had gone wrong between them? If I’d been their son—if I’d stayed their son—maybe I’d have been able to patch things up.
    We went to the counter to get our food and then returned to our table. My birth mother raised her sandwich to her mouth. “I want to know everything about you,” she said. “I want us to catch up.”
    That was what I wanted too. So why did I feel compelled to tell her the truth? “We can’t catch up.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause I’m thirty years old. We can sit here and talk. We can be cordial to each other.”
    â€œBut I want us to be more than cordial.” She reached her hand across the table. For a second I thought she was going to touch me. For a second I wanted her to.
    â€œYou’ve never been part of my life,” I said.
    â€œI know that.” She looked downcast. She had her hand on her water glass. Her fingers made slender imprints in the condensation.
    I could have told her that I loved her and that I didn’t. Why had she brought me into this world? Why had she left me, and why had she waited? Why, right now, had she finally come back, this woman who was sixteen years older than I was, who sat before me after all her troubles and looked young enough to be my sister?
    â€œMrs. Green—”
    â€œPlease, Ben. Susan.”
    â€œSusan.”
    â€œTell me what you’re thinking.”
    â€œI’m not thinking anything right now.”
    â€œThen tell me the first thing that comes to your mind.”
    So I told her that, when we were children, Jonathan would take a picture of me every month. “I used to line up the pictures,” I said. “I was trying to figure out the person I was becoming. I wanted to pinpoint the moment I changed.”
    â€œI like the person you’ve become.”
    â€œBut you don’t know me.”
    â€œI want to get to know you.”
    I wanted to get to know her also. But what if she tried to takeover my life? What would Jenny think—Jenny who had encouraged me to meet her but who hoped that, in doing so, I’d move on? I had no idea how you got to know someone when you were trying so hard to do just that. You could fail from all the effort.
    Perhaps I’d grow bored with her. Or maybe she’d grow bored with me. If we’d met under different circumstances, we might not have had anything to talk about. What could be worse than being bored by your own birth mother?
    â€œHow did you find me?” I finally asked.
    â€œI tracked you down.”
    â€œRight, but how?”
    She cupped her hand in front of her face as though she were about to tell me a secret. But I knew no one in the restaurant besides her.
    â€œI hired a private detective,” she said.
    â€œTo follow