Macy looks down at her plate and turns all rosy in the cheeks.

I hate that there’s all this icky weirdness between Mom and Gramps. I wish I could do something to make it better for both of them. Because the thing is, I can see things from both of their perspectives: I know what it’s like to feel frustrated with your parent the way Mom is frustrated with Gramps, but I also know what it’s like to feel like everybody thinks they know what’s better for you than you do, and then they go ahead and make decisions for you instead of listening to what you want.

Mom sets her fork down and brings her napkin to her mouth before saying, “Sadie, I wanted to tell you, that dog’s owners came to pick her up today.”

“Oh.” I pretend for a second like I don’t even remember what she’s talking about.

“I thought you’d be happy about it.”

Macy gives me a deer-in-headlights look, but Gramps just focuses on his plate of food.

“No. Yeah. I mean good, that’s great!” I try to not be either too happy or too unhappy about the news. “I’m glad,” I finally say.

After dinner Macy and I go to help Gramps organize and sort through his boxes. He shows us a whole box filled with scrapbook after scrapbook of his old newspaper cartoon clippings.

“That’s you: E. Mitchell?” Macy says, pointing at Gramps’s name beneath the cartoon panels.

“It is,” Gramps says, and I can see that it makes him happy remembering those days, the way he tells us stories about so many of them.

He turns page after page. “Your mother kept every single one and put them in these books so we’d always remember.”

“Mom did this?” I’m amazed because I can’t really picture her sitting down and taking all the time to cut each piece out and arrange it with the date and newspaper headline that accompanied it. She never has that kind of patience: once she tried to help Mama and me with a mosaic, and she got so frustrated she had to leave the She Shed. Mom said she was better at putting animals back together than pieces of glass and ceramic.

“Oh, yes,” Gramps says. “Your mother loved to create things, always had a way of making them beautiful.”

Now that definitely sounds like Mama, not Mom. So I check to see if that’s what he means. “Wait, so Mama put these scrapbooks together for you?”

“What?” he says, looking at me with his forehead all crinkled.

“Do you mean Mama made these scrapbooks?” I repeat.

He shakes his head and looks to me and then to Macy, like he’s confused. “Who?” he asks.

“You were saying—” I start to explain, but from the doorway, Mom appears.