Chapter 7

“H oly shit. Sophie? Is that you?”

I squinted because it was so bright outside. Was there a spotlight shining in my face? I carefully lifted one eyelid higher and saw Daniel bending over me, his body blocking the beaming rays of the spring sun. I’d been dreaming about a police interrogation, and it made more sense now.

“What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “Did you fall again?”

I sat up in a stiff, old-lady, pulled-muscle kind of way, carefully lifting my body off from the ground. My slow motion was not due to the fact that I actually had pulled muscles or had suddenly gotten old. No, I was just tired, so tired, and that tiredness extended from my brain to my toes.

“I didn’t fall,” I told him. “I was doing some work out here and I stopped to take a break. I guess I broke for too long and I fell asleep.”

“On the grass?” He tilted his head as he looked at me. “Isn’t it wet?”

Calling my yard “grass” was a little bit of a stretch, but it had been a rainy few weeks and…sugar. I felt the back of my clothing, and indeed it was wet.

“Here.” He held out his hands but I looked at mine and decided it wasn’t a good idea for him to touch me.

“You don’t want to do that,” I advised. “I was cleaning my gutters and it turned out that there were several animal nests in them. That was why they weren’t actively transporting water and it was spilling down the sides of the house, so I had to evict all the residents.”

“Fuck! You fell off your roof?”

“No,” I said irritably. “I just said that I didn’t fall anywhere. I was resting because I was tired after climbing up and down the ladder so many times—”

“Which ladder?” he asked immediately. “The one you had in your backyard? Because that was made of rotten wood and rust. No one should have been climbing that and I hope you weren’t.”

“I was,” I informed him. “It served me just fine.” Up until the point that I had broken through three rungs and sat down hard on my butt, yes, it had been fine. As I remembered that fall, I thought that maybe tiredness wasn’t the only reason I felt achy. “Now my gutters will work, so I’m glad I used it.”

“No, they still won’t work well because they’re cracked and sagging. You need new gutters, which you should have installed when you get a new roof. I saw the tarp covering the hole in the back,” he explained. “Did you also climb that ladder to put it up there?”

“The ladder was fine,” I repeated, and I didn’t want to discuss my roof, gutters, or any other house issues, of which there might have been a few. They were getting solved—gradually. “You don’t have to worry about the ladder because I won’t use it again.” That sounded like gracious acquiescence but the truth was that no one would be using it. After the rungs had broken, the two side pieces had separated from each other and now it was more of a decorative item than it was a functioning tool. Maybe it could have been a big towel bar, but that was about it.

“I’m glad you won’t be climbing it anymore. Thank you.” He reached out to me again. “I’ve been working all day and I don’t care about dirt.”

It was lucky that he didn’t mind grabbing my hands in order to pull me to my feet, and it was also lucky that he’d come over here to wake me. It was possible that I could have spent the night outside in my yard and I had to rise and shine, because I had things to do. Things like my job, which had been on the back burner as of late. I was still accepting new assignments and I was still producing results for my clients, but I knew that I wasn’t doing my best work for them. I found answers but not with my usual speed, and I was a little sloppy in my methods. It was frustrating to behave that way but I didn’t have time for anything else. I was busy.

Because it had turned out that I had been right in my assumptions. Actually, the majority of us (me, Nicola, Addie, Brenna, and Grace) had been proven correct and Team Patrick (whose members consisted only my brother himself, our mom, and Juliet) were the losers.

I sighed. “No, I’m the loser in this situation.”

“What?” Daniel leaned down to look at me more closely. “You’re all dirty so I can’t tell if you have any bruising. Did you hit your head again? Two brain injuries in the span of a few months could be a big problem. I’ll ask Nicola what to do.”

“Why do you have her number?” I asked. “Why are you two in contact? Does this have something to do with my basement?”

“What’s wrong with your basement?”

“Nothing,” I answered. Nothing that wouldn’t dry out once the stupid rain stopped falling and if my gutters would work better. My sister had smelled a slight dampness when she’d stopped by to discuss how we were going to deal with the Patrick issue, and that was why I’d been up on the ladder that had really been fine, for a while.

“Nicola has my number because she had questions about construction at her own house,” he explained. “Apparently, they’re getting some kind of inheritance sooner than they thought, because a boat sank?” He tilted his head. “She mentioned something about nursery rhyme characters drowning and at that point I was unsure if she’d been drinking. Since she’s pregnant, I decided that she must have been sober but I was too thick to understand. By the way, I haven’t told anyone about her baby, as per your directions.”

“You’re not thick! And you can talk about Nicola now. Go ahead and yell it from the rooftops, because people at her hospital already found out. Apparently all her puking was a dead giveaway for the medical professionals there,” I said. “And no, she wasn’t drinking. It’s true that she, her husband, and also Addie are going to get a ton of money pretty soon, because the lawsuits about their inheritance have been dismissed. The people who had sued over it, other relatives, had a freak accident in the Aegean when whales attacked their boat and it went down. The crew was saved but the passengers sank like stones. Personally, I think it was divine intervention because they were terrible.”

Daniel looked horrified but I only yawned. I covered my mouth with both grimy hands because it gaped large enough that my jaw cracked and I leaned backwards, almost losing my balance. He put his hand on my shoulder to steady me. “If it’s not a head injury, then what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

Now I sighed, just as deeply as I’d yawned but with less wobbling. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Esme. It’s kind of tiring.”

His brown eyes widened. “You’ve been spending time with the baby?”

Why did everyone seem so shocked by that? Grace couldn’t believe how much I was over at our parents’ house, and neither had Nicola when our youngest sister had told on me. That was why she’d come over and had ended up sniffing out the problem of my damp basement.

“Yes, that’s right. I’ve been spending time with my niece!” I answered, very irritated. It wasn’t only because of the achy tiredness now. I was allowed to be with relatives, wasn’t I? “Yes, I spend time with Esme! Yes, I help take care of her, because it’s just ridiculous. It’s ridiculous!”

“What is?”

From the moment I’d gone over to my parents’ house on the day that the trio of my mom, Patrick, and his daughter had flown in from California, I’d seen “disaster” written all over the situation. Patrick had already been gone but my mom hadn’t known that he’d left or where he’d headed. It had been a Saturday, but my dad was nowhere to be found (he’d probably been hiding at work) and he hadn’t picked them up from the airport—but in his defense, no one had been aware that they were even arriving! Neither of the adults in their group had thought to call and let us know, not even when they were getting on the plane.

That was why they hadn’t had a car seat ready for Esme, something which was completely necessary since it was completely illegal to drive a kid around without one. And that was just the first thing on the long list of what they hadn’t prepared, or asked for help with, or (apparently) even knew about.

“They didn’t have a pediatrician picked out,” I announced. “They didn’t have a doctor for a baby who just got out of the hospital. They also didn’t have a way to drive her to appointments, if any had existed. They had a single bottle, one, and no supplies to fill it. And there are no available breasts here,” I pointed out. “Patrick’s milk didn’t happen to come in but he never thought, ‘Hey, Esme will want to eat and drink just like I do!’”

“What in the hell are they doing with that baby?” Daniel asked, and it was gratifying to see that he was as incensed as I had been. Addie had been horrified, Juliet apologetic, and Brenna self-congratulatory because she’d been right that our brother was dumb and useless. Grace had disappeared as she’d threatened to before, and Nicola?

“Why didn’t you call me, Sophie?” she’d scolded when I explained the situation to her, as if she was the only person who could ever handle anything. She had her own life to handle and I was taking this, so there!

“I took care of things,” I announced now, which had been the same thing I’d said to my big sister. “I figured out a doctor, and most importantly, I got food. I got a crib, bedding, and clothes. I also got into huge fights with my mom and my brother and got thrown out of the house, but they needed me too much. I was back in a few hours and by that point, some nice firefighters had helped me to install the car seat.”

“Into your car?”

I nodded. “I had cleaned it but it still looked…anyway, I also had it detailed and it’s much better now.”

Daniel seemed impressed. He nodded at me and smiled, and for the first time since Esme’s arrival, I felt something other than anxiety, irritability, exhaustion, and anger. I felt proud, too.

“I’ve been sleeping over there,” I explained. “That’s why I took a nap just now. Esme is having a hard time at night and she gets up a lot.”

“You’ve been sleeping at your parents’ house?”

“Yes, because Patrick is useless,” I seethed, flooded with outrage yet again. “When he was a kid, my mom said that he needed his own room because he was such a light sleeper. So JuJu moved in with the rest of us when she was pretty small and he was alone. But he is not a light sleeper! In fact, I could drive a tractor over his head at night, and he wouldn’t wake up.” And I’d wanted to do that—I’d been plotting ways to kill Patrick, or at the least, seriously maim him.

“He doesn’t wake up when she cries?”

“He doesn’t wake up until someone kicks his butt into gear.” Literally. “But even when he’s awake, he’s hardly what I’d call help. Last night, I had the bottle all ready and he put the top on wrong and it spilled everywhere. The night before that, he dropped the can of formula and made such a mess, and that stuff is so expensive.”

That was another worry. Juliet was still paying me back but all this baby stuff cost more than I could have dreamed. My father was furious, in his quiet way, and was refusing to give anyone money for his grandchild. On one rare occasion when he was back from his office, he’d been roused enough to say that allowing space in his house should have been enough and that Patrick had to shoulder the burden of this situation. Then he’d looked at his only son with an expression of utter disappointment and disapproval, and my brother had left the house until the next day.

“This sounds like a mess,” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t Nicola…yeah, it’s not her problem,” he answered his question, “but why is it yours?”

“Do you want to meet her?”

“What?”

“If you met Esme, you’d understand,” I told him. “The way she snuggles up—she needs somebody because she’s so tiny. She’s so sweet, even when she cries, and she’s just so small, but every part of her is perfect. She has the same color eyes that Patrick and JuJu have, almost like turquoise. But her hair is close to black and it’s so thick and silky, which I guess comes from her mom. Or her grandmother,” I added, because my own mom also had a gorgeous head of dark hair. “She’s the cutest baby in the world and the minute I saw her, I couldn’t let anything happen to her.”

“This doesn’t sound like you. No, it does, in a way,” he corrected himself. “You’re the same Sophie who stood up for Bryden after the prom king and his friends gave him that beating. You always championed the underdog, the people who couldn’t stand up for themselves. You championed me.” He paused. “I never heard you use the word ‘cute’ before, though.”

“It doesn’t often come out of my mouth,” I allowed. “But Esme really is.”

“What is Patrick doing? What about your mom?”

I sighed again. “He’s shirking. It seems to be a full-time activity. She’s doing stuff, like laundry and keeping up with the house. She’s been cooking a ton and I know it’s because she feels comfortable doing that but out of her depth with taking care of kids. She’s trying to make up for it with food for me and Patrick.” And my dad, when he showed up.

“I remember her cooking,” he mentioned. “I came over for dinner a few times and it was delicious. It was odd to eat with so many other people.”

My mind flashed back to the little table in his father’s shack, with only one chair next to it. “It’s definitely nice to have meals like hers, with two or three courses made from ingredients kept at the correct temperature in their fridge,” I agreed. “It would be even better if my mom was changing more diapers. After I yelled a lot, she did start getting up at night sometimes, so we’re trading off more of the bottles.” I always had to fetch her, jolting her out of sleep by shaking her shoulder and saying, “Mom! Mom!” I didn’t have to worry about disturbing my dad, because he was currently sleeping in his home office.

Thinking about how deeply she slept made me nervous and I felt for my phone. “She’s with Esme right now,” I explained. “I said that I had to come home and work.” I found six texts that demonstrated an increasing amount of hysteria. The baby was crying. The second text said the same thing, the baby was crying…still crying, the third message announced, and she wouldn’t take a bottle, and she wasn’t sleeping, either. All of us (meaning the children my mother had birthed) had been such beautiful sleepers, had she ever told me that? So maybe there was something wrong? Maybe Esme’s mother had done something she shouldn’t have while pregnant, or maybe it was just bad genetics—by the way, we (the children she had birthed) had slept and eaten without any problems. Had she ever mentioned that? Hello? Hello!?

Yes, since their arrival from San Franciso, she had told me many, many times about how well we’d all slept. She’d never had to get up during the night, she’d explained, but of course I knew the reason and it wasn’t because we were so naturally attuned to proper circadian rhythms. My grandma and dad had gotten up with us bigger kids, and then Nicola had with the little ones—or we’d just cried.

“I better head over there,” I said. But I looked at my house with a sinking feeling. “I didn’t mean to nap on the lawn. I was supposed to work today.”

“It’s Friday night,” he noted. “You could go out. You might meet someone.”

I thought he might be making fun of me, but his expression was serious. Also, Daniel hadn’t ever made fun of people because he wasn’t like that. “Are you going out?” I asked him, and he started nodding just as a red BMW turned onto our street and then sped toward us with a big roar of the engine. The lady who walked her cat didn’t miss anything that happened around here and she had definitely heard the noise. She shot right out of her house and stood on her porch.

“Sorry about that,” Daniel called down the block as the car slowed. “I’ll talk to her.” He waved and the woman waved back before she and the cat disappeared back into her house.

The red car with the vanity plate had pulled up to the curb—a little onto it, actually, and the engine noises extinguished. Carrington got out but she didn’t speak. She only looked at me and Daniel standing next to each other and he seemed to realize that we were positioned pretty close together.

He stepped away. “Hi,” he said to her, and walked over to the car. “I just got home.”

“You’re not home,” she pointed out. “You’re at someone else’s house. At her house.” Her head swiveled and her chin angled as she surveyed me. “What are you wearing?” she asked.

“Me?” I also glanced down at the red fabric which swathed my body. “My grandma called it a union suit.” It had belonged to my grandfather, so I’d had to roll the sleeves and legs several times. I’d had more clothing on top of it but had stripped down as I warmed up.

“A union suit? Does it date from the Civil War or something?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you seriously asking if I’m wearing an item of clothing that’s more than a century and a half old?” I asked, and Daniel stepped in.

“I saw Sophie lying in her yard so I came over,” he explained. “I thought something was wrong.”

“I see. It’s understandable that you would think so, if she was on the ground like a vagrant.” She eyed me again, nostrils flared.

I straightened my union suit, perfectly at ease. “I probably looked more like a corpse,” I suggested helpfully, but she ignored that.

“And why is your neighbor’s weird behavior your business?” she asked him.

He considered her for a moment. “I can go over and see my neighbors, especially if I think they’re dead,” he answered, and she fixed him with a glare that I didn’t appreciate in the least. She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned, too.

I didn’t like to see someone trying to best him, but this situation was different from when we’d been in high school and I’d stepped in to confront a guy making fun of him in the cafeteria. It wasn’t the same as when I’d told a classmate not to be an idiot, that of course Daniel hadn’t been the one to yell something in the hallway about her butt. He didn’t do things like that and I’d been happy to defend him back then. But he didn’t need me now, because as much as his girlfriend glared and huffed breaths out of her little nose, he only met her gaze calmly.

“Well,” I stated, and they both turned to look at me instead. “I’m going to go see my niece. Her name is Esme,” I explained. “It sounds like my mom is having some problems with her right now.”

“Why does she need you?” Carrington examined my union suit as if my clothing choice said something about my childcare capabilities.

“It turns out that I have an affinity for babies,” I said. “I never had to take care of one, so it must be innate.”

“I thought you grew up in a baby factory,” she told me, then turned to Daniel. “You told me that her mother had a litter of kids.”

“No, I didn’t compare Mrs. Curran to an animal,” he answered, and he sounded angry.

But I nodded. “A litter means that the offspring are born as a batch. In my family, we’re all about two years apart, but I agree that there are way too many of us. My parents should have stopped at one, or they shouldn’t have had any at all.” I looked directly at her. “Some people should opt out of parenting because it’s clear that they only love themselves.”

“I’m lucky that I had good examples in my life, unlike others.” She smiled at me. “I’ll have successful relationships and not end up alone, like a vagrant, because of my wonderful parents who showed me the right path.”

I already knew that her parents were divorced and her dad was on wife number four. Her mother hadn’t remarried, I assumed in order to keep the alimony pumping in, but she’d had a string of boyfriends. One might even have said that she’d had a litter of them, and the current guy was only one year older than her daughter. Not surprisingly, that happy couple didn’t feature in Carrington’s social media, not in a single perfectly posed, expertly edited shot.

“Golly, that is lucky for you,” I marveled. “Do you think that people who don’t have role models like yours will fail in their relationships? Because it sure sounded like you were saying that, Carrington. Is that what you meant? It’s pretty hurtful, considering that so many of us didn’t have the amazing advantage of perfect parents, like you have.”

She caught on immediately. “No!” she answered, already looking up at Daniel. “No, I didn’t mean that people would fail. You know that my parents are divorced and they hate each other,” she told him earnestly.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said cheerfully. “Mine just celebrated their thirty-fifth anniversary.”

“Good for them,” she responded. I thought that was what she’d said, but her teeth were pretty clenched so it was hard to be sure.

“Don’t you need to get going, Sophie?” Daniel asked me. “Weren’t you going to clean up?” He actually pointed toward my door, too.

“Yes, you should definitely change your clothes, because a union suit isn’t normal for an adult woman. And you have leaves stuck all over you,” his girlfriend rallied to inform me.

“Well, that was bound to happen.” I plucked one from my shoulder and stared at it fondly. “I’ve heard the expression a ‘roll in the hay,’ but people can also roll in the leaves—”

“Sophie, go inside!” he ordered, which must have been a skill he’d learned in the military. He’d never ordered me before, not so brusquely, and I jumped a little before deciding that it was probably time. I waved and felt pleased with myself until I saw that I had four more texts from my mom and they were now totally hysterical. Like, bad.

“Coming,” I typed back, and that settled her down for the time that I was in the shower (with a new bar and curtain, a solid blue that I planned to maintain better than I had the last one). She started up again as I was on my way to my former home, driving past the cute red car and the truck now next to each other in the driveway of the Tudor house. He still wasn’t able to park in the garage because I hadn’t gotten around to looking up prices of the things we’d uncovered in his dad’s junk. It wasn’t something he’d asked of me, but I’d said I would do it and I hadn’t. Sugar.

When I approached my parents’ home, I saw my mom out in the yard, talking to one of the neighbors and rocking side to side in the way that signified that the baby was in her arms. I pulled into the driveway, over to the left as far as possible in the space where my dad liked us to park.

My mom quickly said goodbye to her neighbor and rushed over just as I opened the door. “Sophie,” she said, and she sounded so glad to see me. Despite understanding that it was solely my help that she was interested in, I was still happy to hear that quality in her voice. It wasn’t often there when I showed up.

“Hi. What’s wrong with her?” I asked and used my clean arms to reach for the baby and settle her against my shoulder, now covered in a sweatshirt instead of a union suit. Her whimpering reduced to quieter snuffles. “She seems ok.”

“She’s just fractious today,” my mom answered, and she sighed. “You’re good with her.”

That was also nice to hear and I smiled into Esme’s dark hair.

“Do you remember the first time you met her?” Mom asked.

“It was two weeks ago. If I didn’t remember, there would be something wrong with me.”

“You were so awkward,” my mother continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You held her away from you, like a dirty bag of potatoes. You were horrified!”

No, that wasn’t true. I had been overwhelmed and pretty terrified; Patrick had plucked her out of her new crib and put her into my arms, and I couldn’t remember holding someone so small before that moment. Her little mouth suckled at the air and she’d kept her eyes tightly closed and I’d thought, sugar. What am I going to do with this thing?

“Sophie,” my mom had scolded. “Hold her normally, like how you’d carry a doll!”

Addie had been the doll fan, though—I’d never liked them. I’d tried to adjust the tiny baby into a somewhat more natural position and then she’d started to cry. I’d already read everything I could about nutrition, formula, sleeping, brain development, diapering…I’d always been a diligent student and in the time that she’d been in the hospital in San Francisco, I’d applied myself to the study of infants. But at that moment? Everything I’d thought I’d learned flew out the window. It had felt like I had gotten into the cockpit of an airplane as the solo captain, and my preparation for the flight had consisted of glancing through an old car manual. Here was this helpless child and I, Sophie Curran, was supposed to be in charge?

My mom and even Patrick knew a few things, though. They could get bottles together, kind of. They had more experience with changing diapers. But in terms of providing consistent care and attention? Neither of them was good at that, although they both clearly loved her. At least, my mom clearly loved her, but she did love kids a lot and she’d been begging for a grandchild forever. My brother was harder to read. He seemed to care when Esme cried and also seemed concerned about her welfare in a general sense. He was glad when I found a pediatrician and scheduled appointments, he was happy when I came over with my car filled with supplies.

But he also didn’t take the situation as seriously as I wanted him to. Now that he was back in Detroit, he’d started to hang out with his old friends again, the ones he hadn’t seen since he’d left for the new job in California. He fell right back into a familiar pattern of going out, sleeping in, playing video games, and then going out again. His daughter fit into that pattern at times, but not as often as I would have liked. We’d had several arguments about it already and my other sisters, especially Nicola, had talked to him, too. It hadn’t made much of a dent in his behavior.

“I made dinner,” my mom remarked, which meant that while the baby had been so upset, she’d involved herself in cooking.

I didn’t say that, though, and congratulated myself on my restraint. Instead I asked, “Where’s Dad?”

“Work,” she said briefly. “Come see the new knitting pattern I found. I’m going to make diaper covers for the summer with the sweetest little daisies on them.”

I walked slowly behind her into the house. Like my brother’s absence, my dad’s was also not a surprise—not anymore. Since I’d been spending a lot more time at my parents’ house, I’d seen a pattern in his behavior, too, one that hadn’t been clear to someone who’d mostly come over only for irregular dinners and federal holidays. He just wasn’t around. If my mom had been my client, I would have thought…

But that was ridiculous. Still, I’d looked into it, and then berated myself when I hadn’t found a thing, no proof at all of another woman, a drug problem, gambling, or any of the usual suspects. I should have been relieved and let it go. Now I looked at the place in the driveway where his car should have been and thought about it again, though.

The baby made a little noise and I rubbed her back. “Hi, sweetie,” I said. “Did you miss me? Is that why you were upset before?” That shouldn’t have been gratifying, but it was kind of nice to think about her needing me. I had missed her, too, but I’d made myself stay away this afternoon. I had been realizing that I was behaving a lot like Nicola: she gave, people took, so she gave more, then they sucked away her life-force like alien leaches…

Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but after years of telling her just to stop bothering with all of us younger kids, to let us come apart and fall on our faces, I did understand her behavior more now. How were you supposed to let a kid suffer when you knew that you could make it better? It was like watching someone get bullied and not stepping in, and I’d never been able to accept that, either. I kissed Esme’s head again. How could I do anything but love her and care for her?

But dealing with adults? That was different. “Where is Patrick?” I asked as I sat at the kitchen table. I rested my feet on another chair and placed the baby on my thighs. “He was supposed to be home and helping today, all day. No, don’t say he’s job hunting,” I added, since those words had started to come out of my mom’s mouth. “It’s the weekend and I know that’s not true. And don’t say that he’s exercising and that’s so important, either.”

“It is so important,” she immediately responded. “In fact, Juliet and I were just talking about your fitness.”

I looked down at the large plate of goulash she’d just served over a bed of egg noodles. It looked and smelled so good that I was having trouble not burying my face in it. But after the remark about my “fitness,” I held back. “What about it?” I asked.

“Your sisters are so interested in exercise now,” she answered. “Everyone except you and Grace.”

Right, the two of us who had the growing-up to do—I did remember that remark from the baby shower. “Does this have something to do with weight?”

“Sophie! No,” my mother said, horrified. I believed her. One thing she had never, ever done was criticize our bodies or our looks, and it was something I’d always appreciated.

“I’m concerned about you being in the house all the time and not getting out,” she said. “We’ve all been telling you that. We’ve said it for years.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know that I was out today. I was clearing animal nests from my gutters.”

Her nose wrinkled. “That wasn’t what I meant. What if we go upstairs and do yoga together in my studio?”

“The studio that’s also Patrick’s and Esme’s bedroom?” The goulash smelled too good and I had to eat it, regardless of my fitness level. I dug in.

“It’s also my studio,” she said testily. There had already been problems with everyone sharing the space, mostly because my mom liked to do yoga extremely early in the morning and coincidentally, that was when my brother liked to sleep. It didn’t bother him that his daughter wasn’t on that schedule.

She continued to talk about yoga and I ate quickly, because that was something I’d learned about babies. You couldn’t hesitate with life’s necessities. If you needed to go to the bathroom and Esme was happy for a moment, it was not the time to hold it. If she was quietly resting on your thighs while you ate goulash, it was time to go to town on that goulash.

My mom took my empty plate. “Let’s go upstairs,” she urged, and again, I knew it was only because she wanted help with the baby, but it still was nice. We’d hardly ever hung out together. She even put her arm around me as we went.

I saw her glance at Patrick’s unmade bed and she opened the window, too, because it smelled a lot like dirty clothes. She sighed again as she did and I thought that she looked a little sad. This situation probably wasn’t playing out like what she’d pictured when she’d urged us all to have grandchildren. Of course, it was totally her own fault, because she’d brought it on herself.

But…

“I’ll do yoga with you,” I said, and her face lit up.

“I have a pink mat you can use,” she told me, and I smiled back.