But Irene’s skepticism turned out to be misplaced. A few days after Joey’s eighteenth birthday, Maya received a certified letter from the Vital Records office stating that Joseph Edward Molina had requested and been given her contact information.
In the days that followed, Maya nearly lost her head. She began checking the mail all the time, not only out of eagerness and excitement, but also because she was terrified that Rohan might intercept a letter from Joey and learn that she’d been secretly rummaging around in the past. And then one morning in the shop’s mailbox she found an envelope from her boy, Joseph E. Molina, tucked between a utility bill and an appliance catalog. She rushed into the bathroom to read it.
The last news she’d ever heard about Joey was that he’d been taken in as an infant by a generous couple who ran a household bursting with other adopted kids. This meager bit of information had always been a source of comfort to Maya, which was why the return address on Joey’s letter hit her with such sadness and shock: it had been mailed from a state penitentiary in the mountains. She was so mortified that she could hardly rip the letter open, and when she did, Joey’s words only reinforced her horror: Her baby was in prison.
The letter exchange began. Rather than chronicle each step or stage of his life, Joey shared wide swaths of his experience in the foster system, beginning with his broken adoption from the Molina family, but left out his struggles with depression and his inability to feel close to anyone. He asked her a lot of questions, most of which she ignored, especially the ones that concerned his father. He passed away before you were born, she wrote, and that was the first and only reference she ever offered about Mr. O’Toole.
More than anything Maya wanted to go see her young son in prison, to embrace him and stroke his cheeks and begin the long act of apologizing for casting him into the world. Yet she also knew that it was unrealistic for her to make even a single visit. One day was all she needed, but it was too complicated to coordinate the lying and the transportation. What reason could she give to her husband for being away? That she was attending a conference? In what? Doughnut making? Gas pumping? That she was having a spa day? She could not come up with a single believable reason to be away from Rohan.
Why would that boy, she asked herself, even want a mother like her?
Even so, Maya loved exchanging letters with Joey. Although she worried that their contact might threaten to upend her life at the doughnut shop, she also realized, with no small degree of guilt, that there was a certain safety in his imprisonment. Joey was her child, yes, but he was like her child in a playpen in a distant part of the house, occupying her heart but not threatening to interrupt her dinner party, tyrannical though it was. This allowed her to encourage their relationship in a way she might otherwise have not. In her letters, she chronicled Raj’s various school achievements, their daily routine around Colfax—things Joey would ask Tomas about during their nights on level three, Lydia realized, without ever mentioning his newly discovered mother—and put an upbeat spin on her life. She hardly mentioned Rohan.
After a year and a half or so Joey was due to be released, and Maya was worried. In her last letters to Joey in prison, she stressed the importance of keeping their relationship a secret, of giving her the space to figure out how he fit into her present life. She had an older son who didn’t even know of Joey’s existence, and a husband who was unaware that she had tracked him down. It was imperative that he stay away.
And for a long time Joey did. Maya talked to him briefly on the phone sometimes and encouraged him to keep out of trouble and to do well in his rehabilitation programs. She told him that she hoped, one day, to meet him in person—just not now. Never now.
But the postponements went on for too long, and both of them knew it. Joey grew tired of Maya avoiding their reunion and she grew tired of trying to keep him hidden. She began to dodge his phone calls, and sensed a side of him that she’d been happy to ignore before—that of a solemn, desperate boy whose very desperation made people want to avoid him.
At that point, Maya began to receive calls from Irene, who wanted to know if there was anything she could do to facilitate the meeting. Apparently Joey had made a habit of stopping in to see her and begging her to do things that were well beyond her authority. Maya told Irene she had no business calling, that it was bad enough that Joey wouldn’t respect her wishes.
She knew what Rohan was capable of. And she knew that she’d made herself available to Joey when she was really not available. Her feelings were real, but she had no room for that boy in her life.
Just a few weeks ago, Maya finally agreed to meet Joey for an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant on South Broadway. All afternoon at the doughnut shop, she faked groaning trips to the bathroom, then asked Rohan if he could possibly finish up the shift while she went home to rest. He reluctantly agreed, and she hopped a cab straight to the restaurant.
On the cab ride over, she vowed to tell Joey, in no uncertain terms, that he should try to create his own life, separate from her. But when she reached the restaurant and stood on the sidewalk outside, peering through the window at Joey’s quiet table, her heart fell into her feet. Seeing her grown-up baby for the first time in person—with his thick black hair, his long arms, his slender neck—she was floored by how unmistakably he was her son.
Through the window, Maya watched Joey rub his teeth with his finger and stir his salsa with a tortilla chip. Every few seconds he’d touch a button on his suit coat or the knot of his tie, clearly uncomfortable in those grown-up clothes. She’d last seen him in the delivery room when he was less than one day old, and she realized that all of his days since then had been turned over to the world, and even from here she could see that the world had not been merciful.
She wanted to scoop him up and protect him, but that was impossible, so she turned up the sidewalk and walked away from the restaurant, sobbing, and made it home before Rohan had even locked the shop.
Maya should have expected it the next afternoon when Joey showed up at Gas ’n Donuts. He was wearing his black jeans and his black hoodie and he sat on a stool at the counter. Raj had stopped in for a short visit and was sitting by himself in the corner booth, looking through the want ads. Rohan was in the storage room in the back, emptying giant pillows of flour into five-gallon bins. With his scrawny frame and nauseating quivers, Maya first mistook Joey for an addict, but when he pulled back his hood she recognized him immediately. Her first reaction was one of not fear but excitement. She gasped. Raj looked up from his newspaper. Maya was standing next to the coffeepots behind the counter, so only ten feet separated her from her youngest son. As she began to walk in his direction, Joey’s green eyes brightened and she was filled with the same love she’d felt when he was born.
And then she heard Rohan’s voice coming from the kitchen doorway.