“Welcome home, sis. You’re going to have to tell me all about it.”
“As soon as the boys are off to school and she’s asleep.” Sophia pushed her hair back. “Meet me at our spot near the cornfields.”
Sophia pulled the sherpa blanket tighter over her coat and put her hands over the fire that Walter had built for them. They were out on the edge of the farm near the garden, in a patch under an ancient elm tree. Walter had skewered a sausage link on a sharpened stick and held it to the fire. Sophia watched as he concentrated on rotating the meatso that it wouldn’t burn. The fire licked and crackled, and the smoky scent made her salivate.
“You let your hair go back to red,” he said, looking up.
“I didn’t have a choice. No dye at school.” She pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She had let it hang loose under her wool skull cap.
“I like you better like that.” He elbowed her.
Sophia tugged on her hat. “Walt… I gotta tell you something.”
“Shoot.” Walter pulled the sausage back from the fire, tucked it in a piece of foil, and then hung a second raw sausage on the stick and thrust it over the flames.
“I don’t know where to start.” She caught his eye.
“The beginning sounds like a good place.”
“I met a boy.”
“Oooh, Rusty has a crush,” he teased.
“It’s not that.” She watched as the heat made the sausage sweat and drip. “There’s a bit more to it.”
She told Walter about the Old South Ball, finding out that Max was adopted from Germany, the shared fire, how the German phrase just came out of her mouth.
“What did you say?”
“Auf Wiedersehen,”she said softly. “Which means ‘goodbye.’ It felt like it bubbled up from some place deep inside of me. A dormant place that I hadn’t known existed.”
Walter turned the sausage while she recounted going home with Willa for Thanksgiving break and meeting the woman in the library. “Mrs. Porter Wesley was her name, I think. She gave me these articles. Apparently, there were hundreds or thousands of children abandoned in Germany called ‘Brown Babies’ or ‘War Babies.’ They were children of German mothers and the Negro G.I.’s who were stationed there.” She took a breath. “This woman, Ethel Gathers, adopted a bunch of kids of her own, I think she has like eight, and then helpedother American families adopt the half-Negro kids so they wouldn’t be stuck in the orphanage.”
Walter lifted the meat from the fire as Sophia told him how she had found Mrs. Gathers in the white pages and shown up at her house.
“Why would you do that?” Walter wrapped the sausage in foil and handed it to her.
“There was something inside me that needed to know.” She swallowed. “If I was one of those babies brought here.”
She expected Walter to laugh, but he didn’t. He held her gaze. “And?”
“Turns out I am. I was adopted, Walter. My real name is Katja.”
Walter cast his eyes down to the ground. Sophia knew he would be disappointed that she wasn’t his blood sister. But her brothers were all she knew, and she could never love them any less, bloodline or not.
“I know,” Walter spoke up.
Sophia choked on her sausage. “You what?” He handed her his canteen of water, and she drank. “Walt? What do you mean, you know?”
“I’ve always known. I remember the long plane ride. Walking through the airport with the cameras flashing. Then us riding in the car with Ma Deary and the Old Man.”
“So we came here together? You were the boy Mrs. Gathers mentioned?”
Walter nodded.
“How did I miss that?” She shook her head.
“When we first got here, you and I used to whisper in German, but Ma Deary put a stop to it. She said if she heard us speaking German, she would slap our faces. So we stopped.”
