job I’d started the year before. I took the old women for walks, pushing their wheelchairs through the leafy streets near University Avenue. Mostly, I took one of two women, Lucille or a woman who called herself Zsa Zsa, who often sang “Tiny Bubbles” as we walked. The women seemed to enjoy our time, but they didn’t remember me between visits.
I ran into my mother a few times near that part of Palo Alto, once on Hamilton on my walk back from volunteering, when she was getting into her car after a yoga class. She called out to me, and we talked for a few minutes, small talk. I was careful to leave quickly. When I saw her, I was filled with simultaneous feelings of longing and dread. I tried to get away as fast as possible, so I wouldn’t be caught. I was afraid of someone seeing us together and reporting it to my father, afraid of going against the rules, and also afraid of her anger.
I did not want to admit how much it had been a mistake, how horribly lonely I was already, how I needed her again. And I didn’t see a way to get out of it.
My father hadn’t forbidden calls, and some evenings in the fall, after the rest of the family was asleep, after school had started, my mother and I began to talk on the phone.
I pulled the box of the landline phone as far as it would go on the wire, and then pulled the looped cord behind the dish rack and wedged the headset between my head and shoulder. We talked as I washed the plates. I worried she would say I had betrayed her, but she didn’t. These nights on the phone, her curiosity and warmth lifted me up. We did not talk about the fact that we weren’t supposed to see each other. We didn’t argue. She didn’t let on, but later she told me that she was worried about me, and that she began to stay at home in the evenings so she’d be there to pick up the phone in case I called.
My father commissioned a low split-rail fence to run like a brace around the cornered front yard of the house. The grass was torn out and only dirt remained. A tree would be planted there on the Waverley side.
“I like East Coast oak trees,” Laurene said in the car, when they were talking about what to plant.
“Do you know about the East Coast kind, Lis?” my father said, glancing at me in the back seat. He usually used the words “East Coast” as a synonym for “inferior.”
“What do they look like?”
“There,” he said, pointing to one growing between the sidewalk and the road. It looked nothing like a California oak. Its leaves were larger and shaped like they’d been perforated around the edge by a large hole puncher.
In the end, they chose to transplant a mature copper beech. The tree was inserted with a crane into a deep hole. A huge trunk, a wiry ball of roots. The beech stood as tall as a two-story building, taller than the top of the house, the limbs reaching up and sideways like a broom, dead leaves dangling on otherwise bare branches.
When I left the house in the mornings, and in the evenings when I returned from school, I looked for evidence of life—leaves, buds—something to indicate the tree would grow and flourish. After about a month, the tree still hadn’t changed. It didn’t leaf out or unkink to become symmetrical like other trees, but still listed, bare. One day, a crew of men arrived, sawed the trunk and branches into sections, and took it away.
A friend of my father’s, Joanna, came over for lunch—she’d been part of the original Apple team and had a son who was about nine months old, like Reed. Steve gave her a tour of the house. “These,” he said, pointing to the silvered wooden beams on the ceiling of a small alcove, “were used to build the Golden Gate Bridge.” I thought he meant they were part of the structure itself, but later I understood they’d been part of the scaffolding.
“Don’t you worry about protein, Steve?” she asked while we ate. She spoke with a pleasing accent. She talked about children’s developing brains, how a vegan diet might not contain enough protein or fat. You could tell she was a worrier.
“Nope,” my father said, with a calm authority. “You know breast