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she’d been gone, I’d watered her prized orchids exactly twice.
    I’m such a wrong person for this chore. The only kind of flowers I like are delivered. Her plants seem to sense this. It’s like the little bastards make a suicide pact the minute they see me walk through the door. Leaves drop, buds rot. It isn’t pretty.
    The whole “water my orchids” thing is penance. Yet another way my mother has to subtly remind me that I’m a failure. My brown thumb is legendary. My sister, Lisa, on the other hand, could breathe life into firewood.
    But Lisa is in New York, finishing her residency and planning the September wedding of the century. It isn’t just a residency. No, Lisa wouldn’t settle for just becoming a doctor. Nope, she’s spent the last three years specializing in pediatric oncology. My mother likes to tell anyone who stands still about her daughter who is going to cure childhood cancers. It works kind of like this: Total stranger, “Do you have any children?”
    My mother, “Yes, I have a beautiful daughter, Lisa. She graduated at the top of her class from Harvard Medical School. She was on a complete academic scholarship. Lisa is engaged to marry Dr. David Huntington St. John the Fourth. He’s the son of Georgia State Supreme Court Justice David Huntington St. John the Third. Lisa and her fiancé plan to have a fall wedding—at the family estate in Buckhead, of course—because David the Fourth is spending the summer in Central America donating his time to Doctors Without Borders. Oh, wait . . . yes, and I have another daughter, whose name escapes me at the moment.”
    I swallowed my own pettiness. Truth be told, Lisa is a decent person, and David Four seems like a great guy. It’s just that the better they are, the worse I look to the rest of the world in general and to my mother in particular.
    It doesn’t help that my mother is Cassidy Presley Tanner Halpern Rossi Browning Johnstone, former rising star for the Metropolitan Opera. Cassidy is actually a stage name, made legal for a hundred bucks back in the seventies. She thought it sounded better than her birth name, Carol more exotic and more in keeping with her destiny.
    My mother had a beautiful voice. Her promising opera career was cut short by nodules on her throat. The removal of those nodules turned her amazing voice into something less than what is required of a star soloist. So she embarked on a second career—serial marriage.
    It worked out pretty well for me. My mother’s first husband was Jonathan Tanner. I was eighteen months old at the time. He adopted me and treated me like his very own.
    Which was a good thing, since I didn’t find out he wasn’t my biological father until I was thirteen. And I only found out then because I had snuck into my mother’s lingerie drawer because I wanted to know what a two-hundred-dollar bra looked like. That’s when I found my birth certificate and my adoption papers.
    Until then, I was told that my name—er, names —were old family names on my mother’s side. Technically true.
    Finley and Anderson are both family names, just not members of her family. They’re the surnames of the two men my mother was sleeping with when she got pregnant with me.
    Maybe it should have bothered me, but it didn’t because Jonathan was a great dad. Ironically, even though we didn’t share any DNA, he never treated me any differently than Lisa. My mother was the one who blatantly showed favorit-ism. It wasn’t that I was unwanted. It was more a function of Lisa being so perfect. Lisa was an easy child. I was the challenge—the kid who, when told the stove was hot, had to touch it just to make sure. My dad saw it as spirited.
    My mother found it irritating.
    I’m guessing that’s why, after fifteen years, I still miss him. Jonathan was a great guy and a hard act to follow.
    I’m sure he’s why my mother likes being married.
    She’s currently on the prowl for husband number six, which is how I got stuck