Ruth seemed tired, but when we walked through the gates, she grinned at me and said, “Geometric!” She pulled out her small flip notebook. I already had my camera.

At the zoo that day, sometimes we ran from exhibit to exhibit, and sometimes we sat for a long time and watched. Especially the gorillas. There was a new baby gorilla, and we watched it roll around and pull its mother’s arm and chuck straw in her face.

I got a great shot of the shapes on a giraffe’s neck. I took pictures of fish scales and polar bear noses and even the perfectly circular sewer cover. My best shot from that day, from that Geometric Treasure Hunt, was a close-up of the diamond-shaped scales on the crocodile’s shoulder. Ruth jotted down song ideas and lyrics in her notebook. Sometimes her eyes got a little glazed and I had to remind her to keep going, but she didn’t complain or grumble or snap at me or anything.

She didn’t even get upset when, that night, I chose Boggle for our game. Ruth and I had already gone through my pictures and listened to her short “Geometric Treasure” playlist (with epic songs like “Turning Circles” by Judas Priest), and then we all sat up to the table. Mom had made a German chocolate cake, and we laid it in the middle of the table while we played and ate straight from the pan.

Halfway through round number five, I realized Ruth had put her pencil down and she was staring blankly at her paper. Mom noticed too.

“Hon?” she asked, so softly I barely heard. “If you want to go lie down, that’s okay.”

The words seemed to take a moment to get through Ruth’s haze, but when they did, she blinked and shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I can…”

She picked up her pencil, but her grip was so weak it dropped to the floor. She didn’t even have the energy to bend down and pick it back up.

The sand in the Boggle timer ran down.

I put my pencil down too. “I know! Let’s go watch Edward Scissorhands!”

Dad cleaned up the game and Mom got the movie set up. Ruth and I flopped next to each other on the couch. She’d been having some trouble sleeping, and I had a faint hope that she would doze off during the movie and get some rest, but my guess was that she probably wouldn’t. She would stare at the screen the whole movie, like usual, so wide-eyed I wouldn’t know if she was seeing every tiny thing that happened or seeing nothing at all.