with a fringe, and platform shoes.
“Hey, Lis, we’re going to need you to step out of this next photograph,” my father said.
I stepped out and watched, pretending I didn’t care. At some point during a few shots of my father holding my brother, Reed started to wail, and Laurene took him upstairs to change his diaper. My father slipped away to his study to work, vanishing as he often did in between moments.
It was one of those days when the light was diffuse and watery, the sun a yellow smudge behind clouds. The photographer looked at me, standing beside him. “Can I take some pictures of you?” he asked.
“I’d love it,” I said, even though I sensed it was not allowed.
I was wearing the jeans my father told me to wear. “Wait,” I said, and ran down the hallway to my bedroom and pulled on a dress of my mother’s from the seventies that hung in my closet. It fit like a muumuu: long sleeves that buttoned at the wrists, a pattern of small gold and cream flowers on a black background, and thin gold piping around the neck and the sleeves. From a high flat placket in front it hung down to my ankles.
I’d wanted a professional photograph for years—I saw them framed on walls at friends’ houses; now it was happening, but without my mother. Wearing her dress was a way to have her there too. Who cared if the dress was old and unfashionable.
I ran back down the hall, barefoot and, breathless, stood where he told me to, beside an Eames chair and ottoman. I knew I was getting away with something, stealing the spotlight like this; he might have sensed it. A flurry of clicks; the faster we went, the more photographs we’d get. I smiled big, showed my teeth, made my eyes bright.
My father emerged from his study. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking at me up and down, in the dress.
“He said he would take—”
“Stop it,” he said to the photographer. “Stop it right now.”
One night, doing dishes and talking on the phone with my mother, I mentioned that I had a dentist appointment, and she offered to pick me up and take me. I accepted her help, guiltily, sensing that my father and Laurene would not approve of her ferrying me places. I would be under her influence when I was supposed to be under theirs. I might have biked to my appointments, as they said I should, but I was too lazy for the forty-five minutes across town to the dentist, the doctor, the therapist, especially if my mother would give me a ride. Was it these sorts of tasks that had made my mother unable to care for me? Now, burdening her, I might push her past a limit.
She insisted it wasn’t a problem.
“I want to help,” she said. “But don’t be late. I don’t like waiting in front of that house for you to come out.”
On Saturday, all of us were in the kitchen, the windows looking out to Santa Rita, where she would park and expect me to run out. I hadn’t told my father or Laurene she was coming.
This morning, in the kitchen, we coalesced into a family.
“This old man, he plays one, he plays knick-knack on my thumb,” my father sang to Reed, who was sitting on his lap, slapping at his knees. My father took Reed’s hands in his and twirled them around each other. Reed had recently grown another tooth. Why, Reed asked over and over, in response to whatever one of us said. Whywhywhy? He was elbows and knees, bright blond hair, red lips, a dimpled chin, and miniature biceps. I loved his laugh with his head thrown back, his spaghetti arms twisting out of grasp. He was three, but he still did not sleep through the night. He woke me up in the early morning, running into my room and tickling me awake under the armpits.
Laurene and I made bruschetta according to her recipe. “Good job, Lis,” she said, as I added the garlic and dripped the garlic and oil on the bread. I was filled, at that moment, with a sense of real family, the joy in the kitchen. We had reached an eminence.
My mother was probably already parked out front, waiting for me; I knew I was supposed to be outside ready to go. I wished I’d never made the plan with her, wished I could somehow get her to