Darkroom: A Moo U Hockey Romance Kate Willoughby (read full novel .TXT) 📖

crust on my pizza, but yours is so good. Crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.”

“It’s the oven. It’s an antique, imported from Italy.”

“Really?”

My dad laughed. “No. The oven was from a kit we got from a company in Salinas, California. But it really does make the best crust.”

My dad then talked about his beloved pizza oven, Marge, short for Margherita for the next fifteen minutes—the eight-hundred-degree temperatures necessary for cooking the pizzas, how the draft and ventilation system created and maintained those temperatures, how we could bake one hundred pizzas per hour in it…

Poor Hudson. I’d warned him my parents could be a little much.

Eventually, my mom said, “Enough about Marge, Kevin. I want to find out how these two met. I meant to ask you when we were in Boston but I forgot.”

I glanced at Hudson and my cheeks warmed. There was no way I was telling my parents about walking in on Hudson and my ex-roommate. Or about how I crashed into him and turned his shirt into a Jackson Pollock painting.

Luckily, Hudson said, “We are taking the same photography class and we paired up for a project.”

“Oh, something creative. How nice,” my mom said. “What was the project?”

We told them about the interviews we had to conduct and showed them the results, and my mother noticed the photographs I had from the dumpling-making day.

“What are those?” She peered closer. “It looks like you’re cooking something.”

“They’re dumplings,” I said.

“Really? Those are the weirdest shaped dumplings I’ve ever seen,” my mom said, having enlarged one of the photos.

“They may be weird,” Hudson said, “but they taste like heaven.” He kissed his fingers in appreciation. Ruby and I had made a couple of batches since then. They were handy to keep in the freezer and cheap to make.

“One of Ruby’s old professors is Chinese and she invited me and Ruby over to make dumplings,” I explained.

My parents exchanged a glance.

“What’s that look?” I asked.

“We’re just…surprised,” my dad said.

“Ever since I can remember,” my mom said, “you’ve been adamantly opposed to anything Chinese. We tried to introduce you to all sorts of things, but you refused to cooperate. We even signed up for a summer camp for families with children adopted from China, which we thought sounded perfect. The kids had activities—dancing, crafts and games and the adults had their own sessions about the phases of adoption and our children’s heritage. But you cried for hours and begged us not to make you go.”

“You actually screamed at the top of your lungs,” my dad said. “It was a fit like you’d never thrown before so, against our better judgement, we cancelled the trip.”

“I…don’t remember that,” I said. I searched my memory and found nothing, but that didn’t mean anything. There was a lot about my childhood that was a blur.

“How old was I?”

“About six, I think,” my mom said.

My dad nodded in agreement. “So, even though we didn’t go to the camp, we tried to teach you about your heritage, but you made it clear you didn’t want anything to do with your birthplace, so eventually, we gave up.”

I sat there, stunned and speechless at this revelation. I’d been harboring a grudge against China since I was a little girl and forced my parents to go along with it.

“I had no idea,” I said. “All this time, I thought you were just, I don’t know, trying to make me assimilate more fully as an American.”

“You thought we were racists?” my dad asked, looking hurt.

“No! No, I didn’t, honestly. If you were racist, you would have adopted a white girl.”

“But you thought we valued our culture over yours,” Dad said.

“I did, yes, but I know now that isn’t true.”

Hudson cleared his throat. “You know what this means, right?”

“What?” I asked.

“It means you’ve got to make us dumplings for dinner,” he said.

My parents agreed wholeheartedly. “That sounds wonderful!” my mom exclaimed.

“Can you make enough for staff meal?” my dad asked.

“I can. We can,” I said, glancing at Hudson. “The recipe makes a lot.”

As I got a piece of paper to write down a list of what we needed to pick up from the grocery store, I was filled with a relief I couldn’t even describe. I’d come to think that part of my reluctance to explore my Chinese side came from the mistaken belief that my parents wouldn’t like it. I owed them so much and I tried never to displease them out of respect and love. But now that I knew the truth—that they wanted me to embrace my heritage—I was free to be as Chinese as I wanted. What a revelation.

28

Hudson

I hadn’t understood until this road trip how much it took for Indi to “make herself presentable”—her words, not mine. I’d thought she put on something to cover up the birthmark and then regular makeup on top of that. Boy, was I wrong.

I know this because on the day we were setting out for Brooklyn for part two of our Thanksgiving road trip, I convinced her to let me watch her do her face and it took a long time and a bag full of products—stuff to moisturize, stuff to prime, stuff to cancel out the purple, stuff to conceal. And there was so much blending. I swear, she spent half the time dabbing at her face with a sponge so it looked smooth. Eventually, she put on stuff I was more familiar with—mascara, eye shadow, blush.

When she was done, she turned and smiled at me. “Here it is. Totally worth the effort, right?”

“You look beautiful, as always,” I said in a tone that must have pinged her radar in some way.

Narrowing her eyes, she put her hands on her hips. “But…?”

I hesitated to tell her what I really felt, but in the end, decided honesty was the best policy. All I wanted was for her to realize, to me and her parents and everyone who loved her, she was perfect the way she was and