walls are so heavy and full I could almost smell them. My mother is perhaps twenty-five, already married, already a mother, yet at the height of her beauty. Her hair was so gold and fine, I used to expect butterflies to light on it. I held a finger up to the photo, as if I could feel it. When I needed hair for my fairy garden princess, I always used the fine strands from her hairbrush.
“No, over there.” Ellie pointed impatiently. On my mother’s left, two cedar-shake bird houses rose from the garden soil on sticks.
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s three, plus I have a bird house in my backyard… and you have one outside your bathroom window!”
My heart fell a story in my chest. How on earth had she seen that? I’d hung it in the tree so it was only visible, I thought, from a certain angle of the bathtub. The green base and brown roof blended in with the foliage. Or so I’d thought.
“Grandma?”
“Yes?”
“You seem a million miles away.” It was one of her mother’s expressions, wildly preferable to something glib her classmates might have said, like, “Earth to Grandma, do ya read me?”
“Do I? I’m just, uh, thinking about this idea of yours. This aspect.”
“And?”
“I can’t help thinking, Ellie, that dollhouses are…” I hesitated, wanting to choose the best words, “more family oriented, more historically significant, I think, than bird houses.”
“No, Grandma. Dollhouses are too girly. And… I don’t even like dolls.”
“But a bird house is such a… I don’t know… such a small thing. In the scheme of a family and a heritage and a… legacy.” I tasted tears in my throat. Were they caused by her choice, or my own fumbling words? She knew nothing, so why did it matter, why did it hurt so much? I breathed in sharply, willing it away. I was becoming a dreaded thing: a silly, sentimental, forgetful old woman.
“But, Grandma,” she said, rising to her knees with excitement, “I could buy a silk bird and wire it to the cover!”
She had me. How could anyone argue against such a brilliant book cover?
I cleared my throat, shook off whatever had welled up. “I believe our Adirondack house had a bird house out back,” I said with a smile, and we spent the rest of the evening flipping the pages quickly and carelessly until we found it. By the time we made a list of everyone in the photos, names and ages and other pertinent information, it was nearly nine. I told her we could work on the cover next time.
I drove Ellie home and noticed that Tinsley’s station wagon wasn’t in the driveway. Tom rubbed his eyes as he stood at the door, and I worried that I’d woken him, that he’d fallen asleep at his desk.
“Sorry we’re a bit late,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “You’re early, actually.”
“Didn’t we say eight-thirty?”
He blinked. “It’s a weekend, so we said nine-thirty, Mom,” he replied, with a softness at the edges of his voice. He reached out and squeezed my hand, and I let him, even though I knew what it meant and what he was trying to say and all I wanted was to yank my hand away and tell him, no, like a mother does, you’re wrong.
I was on edge all the way home. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, and not think about my mother, and the day Aunt Caro called me from the carriage house to tell me someone had left the teakettle on all day, ruining the kettle and the stove, nearly setting fire to the whole kitchen. When Caro asked my mother how it had happened, how it could have gone unnoticed, she said she thought the kettle’s whistle was a silly bird in the backyard. A few months later, we placed Mother in a nursing home. But this was different, I told myself. Dear lord, I may forget a time or a date now and then, but I know a pot from a bird!
I shook off the memory, but something lingered. I kept expecting a raccoon or a deer to leap into the path of my car; the wind to knock a tree across the road. I told myself Tom was just being gracious, not concerned. I told myself it was Ellie’s project, not mine. But it didn’t feel that way. No.
As much as Ellie and I had outlined and sketched, as much as we used innocuous tools like pencil and glue,