there for almost a minute, holding the silent phone against my ear. I could have fallen asleep just sitting there, without even taking off my shoes. I would have to get up early in the morning. Jimmy Liff was picking me up at eight. He’d said it was the only free time he had before he left, and he wanted to show me how to get to the town house, and how to water the more delicate plants.
I changed into my pajamas and slippers, got my little basket of toiletries, and shuffled to the bathroom at the end of the hall. But even when I returned to my room, my face scrubbed, my teeth clean, I didn’t get into bed right away. I dragged the heavy wooden chair by my desk over to the closet, climbing up to reach the top shelf. I had everything up there—yearbooks, photo albums, ice skates, a book report I’d gotten to read over the radio in junior high—all the things that a college student with still-married parents would probably leave in a bedroom back home.
I found the cardboard box I was looking for and lowered myself into the chair.
My mother made amazing photo albums. My sister and I each had our own, our names cross-stitched on the front. Inside, she’d labeled each picture with the date, the event, and the names of everyone pictured. In the early years, before digital cameras, she used scissors to crop distracting backgrounds. She colored in our flash-startled eyes with brown marker. Once she got a digital camera, she could put all her energy into the layouts. She used wallpaper scraps for colorful borders. She included party invitations and notes from teachers, and a pressed flower from my prom corsage.
I moved the albums out of the box, one at a time, until I came to my parents’ wedding album. The last time I was at my mother’s apartment, she’d asked me if I wanted to keep it. She said she didn’t want it around.
I flipped through the pages slowly. The corners were yellowed, and some of the pictures were stuck to their shiny vinyl pockets. As a child, I had looked through this album so often, and so slowly, that every image was already burned in my mind: the little campus chapel where the ceremony took place, the priest standing in front of a magnolia in bloom; my father, young and skinny in his tuxedo, barely recognizable, his hair long enough to cover his ears. And my mother, her dark hair falling to her waist, in a white dress with a Cinderella hoop, a too-big bow on the chest. She was twenty-two. She looked happy in the picture, her smile wide, her eyes bright, the breeze lifting her hair and veil. There is a picture of her with my now-dead grandmother, and in it, they both look so vibrant, my grandmother wearing a bright blue hat, my mother’s head resting on her shoulder. There is a picture of my mother and father cutting the cake together. He is looking at her and saying something, and she is looking at the camera, clearly trying not to laugh.
It was hard to look at that picture, especially, and not feel bad for both of them, considering how it all turned out. I didn’t understand why my mother had done whatever she’d done with the Sleeping Roofer, why she’d let our whole world fall into this strange and un-organized landscape. She’d been unhappy, she said. I squinted down at her youthful face in the camera’s flash, searching for some clue, some way she could have known from the very start, even a hint at the world of difference between what she expected on that happy day, and all she had not foreseen.
3
HAYLIE BUTTERFIELD WAS THE only person in the dorm I knew from home. Her family lived just a few blocks away from our cul-de-sac, in a palatial house with a circular drive and small fountain in front, their mailbox hidden inside a statue of a lion. When Haylie and I were very young, we had almost been friends. She had a castle-shaped playhouse in her backyard that was three stories high, made with real wood, with glass windows and a spiral stairway down the middle. Also, incidentally, Haylie was nice. So whenever her mother called my mother and asked if I wanted to come keep her daughter company, I was always ready to go.
Haylie’s mother, Pamela Butterfield, was a runner. Even in