a small, polite serving of macaroni and cheese. It looked different to her, I’m sure, with its toasted bread crumbs and curly noodles. She took one tentative bite, then stood up to ladle more onto her Beatrix Potter plate. After that was gone, she chose a round sandwich and examined it in the air before she ate it, as if trying to determine how it had been shaped. Only after she’d chewed and swallowed it did she ask if I’d used a cookie cutter on the bread, and I told her it was a shot glass.
“A shot glass?” She wrinkled her nose, and I brought her one from the kitchen.
“This is a shot glass,” I said. “The edges don’t need to be sharp to cut the bread.”
She held it in her hand. “Well, it seems too small to drink out of, so you may as well use it for something,” she said, and I smiled. I was learning—she was practical, she liked jelly, she liked cheese, and she took her homework very, very seriously.
I suggested we look through the scrapbooks together, and perhaps a theme would emerge. She opened the first one and asked the usual kinds of questions—“Who is that?” and “Where are they?” and “When was this taken?” I took care to point out the large homes in the backgrounds. About halfway through the second scrapbook she asked me if I’d looked at them earlier in the day.
“I looked at them last night, before I took them down from the attic. Why?”
“Because you’re not really looking, you’re just waiting for me to look.”
“Well, I’ve seen them before,” I said defensively.
But she was right. I was waiting; my moment would come in just a few pages.
But when Ellie turned the page and saw a photo of my father looking at blueprints, she barely gave it a glance. She was more interested in the photo opposite it, an eight-by-ten of my mother on a horse, posing with a shotgun.
“You know, that photo gives me an idea,” I said.
“Guns?” she said. “I don’t think Ms. Westerman wou—”
“No, the other one. The blueprints. My father was an architect and so was Grandpa Theo. And there are so many beautiful homes in all these pictures. Nantucket, Bar Harbour, Stamford, the Adirondacks… and did you see my uncle’s house in Miami Beach?”
“Um—”
So what do you think of ‘Architecture’ as a theme?”
“Aspect.”
“Yes, well, aspect then.”
“I don’t know, Grandma,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so… grown up.”
“Well, cooking was also grown up.”
She shrugged. “But kids can cook. If they want to.”
I wanted to say they could also build houses, of a sort. Lincoln logs and whatnot. Even my fairy garden contained structures. But it was a lame argument; she’d won. I’m a little ashamed to admit I felt deflated.
“Well,” I said brightly, “if we don’t think of anything else, we know ‘Architecture’ will certainly work. It can be your fallback.”
She continued to turn pages, still scanning the photos earnestly. But there was a detachment about the way she did it that reminded me of dealers at flea markets. All business. It was clear my idea had been shot down—you could tell by her posture and the little furrow of blond hair between her eyebrows. She wasn’t going to change her mind. It was a boy’s quality, really, that kind of focus. Tom had it, too. He had his choice of clients at the law firm, and he always chose the ones who were innocent. Tinsley says it’s a gift, his ability to know what’s in a person. To sort through the rubble of an organizational chart and find who is destined to rise to the top. He could probably choose presidential candidates, she once said, be a political consultant. And now, watching Ellie, perhaps she could, too. She certainly was looking through the scrapbooks with nation-building intensity. Then it struck me with a smile: this was also how Theo looked at his blueprints.
“Is this your father, here?” she asked, lingering on a page.
I nodded. It was a snapshot of him in the Adirondacks, submerged in the lake up to his chin. Behind him in the water, perhaps thirty feet away, were two ducks. But all I saw when I looked at it was the “cabin” on the lake, a compound really, with tennis courts and a boathouse, that Mother had been forced to sell. I’d planned to take my girlfriends for a weekend there just after high school graduation; the invitations were sent, the menu