“That is absolutely right,” says Ruth. “Let’s find your mom, okay? Can you remember what color shirt she was wearing?”

“Abby!”

A woman with a baby in one arm and a spit-up stain down her left shoulder comes running toward us. She’s got those exhaustion lines under her eyes and she practically melts onto the floor in front of the little girl.

“Honey, you have to stay holding on to the bag, remember?”

“I had to say bye-bye.”

The woman sighs. “I know. Okay, let’s go. Don’t you want to see the octopus?” She stands up, a tight grip on her daughter’s hand. She adjusts the diaper bag over her shoulder while trying to hold the baby in one arm and keep a handhold on Abby with the other. She pauses long enough to turn toward Ruth. “Thank you so much,” she says. “Sorry, I’m all over the place…”

In the particular shrug of Ruth’s shoulders, I can tell she has the exact right words for this situation, like an artist with custom paints.

“Naw,” says Ruth. She looks back at Abby. “Hey, it’s pretty sweet you have a mom who takes you to the aquarium, huh?”

Abby hops a little. “Yeah, to see the octopus like on TV.”

The woman shakes her head and laughs. “She is weirdly obsessed with the Discovery Channel, I swear.”

Ruth points her elbow over in my direction, but she doesn’t look at me. “When she was little, my sister used to cry herself to sleep at night if my mom wouldn’t let her watch Shark Week.”

The woman laughs. Ruth smiles again.

“Anyway, thanks,” the mom says.

“Have fun,” Ruth says. Mom and daughter leave. As Ruth watches them go, her shoulders slump back down.

I have an imaginary conversation in my head, where I tell Ruth that things will be one hundred okay. What I do know one hundred percent is that in that hypothetical conversation, her response is an eye roll and a huff. And that’s on a good day.

How come she gets to tell someone things will be okay, but I can’t tell it to her? Just because she’s sixteen and that girl was five doesn’t make it any different.

And there’s something else too. Ruth has had a pen cap between her teeth and a notepad on her lap for most of her life. She practices her words like Serena Williams practices serves. She’s careful with them and uses them exactly the way she wants. So why do her softest ones seem to flow more freely to strangers than to me?

I try to hold tight to the good ones she just gave me, even if I wish I got them more often.