As I put everything back and prepared to leave, I realized I’d forgotten to check the bottom drawer. I pulled it out, expecting to find more clothing. Instead I found my sister staring back at me.

I didn’t have time to search the girls’ room, which wasn’t urgent anyway. After I finished searching Wendy’s, the handyman called to say he was on the way.

Dave was a little guy, several inches shorter than my five foot four but as solid as a retaining wall. Since he clearly knew his stuff, I gave him my list and made a few advance dinner preparations while he ran through the little jobs. After he took a good look at the front door, he called me out of the kitchen to consult.

“The doorknob is inoperable, and the dead bolt can’t be fixed.”

I dried my hands on a dish towel. “That’s what I told my mother.”

“I’ll replace them both, but while I’m at it, I can do the door out to the garage, too. It’s not in great shape, either. Same keys. That’ll make it easy for anybody living here.”

I figured we ought to go for broke. “Can you put a better lock on the glass door leading out to the screened porch?”

“That lock’s fine, but I can rekey it to match.”

This time while he worked, I trooped upstairs to avoid the grinding and banging. I had my sister to keep me company. The bottom drawer of Wendy’s dresser held two bulging scrapbooks filled with the minutiae of her life.

In the first, every school photo had been carefully preserved, along with candid photos of Wendy with friends, and one of her holding me. In that one, like the others, she was smiling, but she didn’t look happy. Who wants a living reminder that your parents are still having sex when you’re already starting college?

The array of photos showed a beautiful child growing into a radiant young woman. If she’d ever gone through an awkward or homely stage, pimples or buckteeth, the bad news had not been recorded. From page one until the end, Wendy was a poster child for good genes and parenting.

The second scrapbook contained every award, every newspaper article where her name had been mentioned, every recital program—be it dance, piano, or the middle school concert band where she’d played second chair flute. There were art projects, letters she’d written from summer camp and report cards. I expected to see baby teeth and fingernail clippings.

My mother had lovingly compiled every achievement of Wendy’s childhood and adolescence, a historical record of supremely happy and successful decades of my sister’s life.

As I closed the second book, I wondered if Mom, who had clearly reveled in Wendy’s popularity and accomplishments, had stood over a copy machine and replicated each of these pages for herself.

My second thought? Had she compiled even one scrapbook for me?

My childhood wasn’t exactly normal. By the time I came along, my parents should have been saying a fond goodbye to child rearing. The evidence in my lap concluded they’d done that first stint well, and it should have been enough. Wendy, the living proof, had exceeded all expectations. Then along had come Ryan Rose, whose premature birth in a foreign country had been such a trauma that I had started life with the wrong foot forward.