I was on her twentieth year when Rusty came home. His footsteps echoed across the empty house, and I knew these steps as they moved into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator—he’d be grabbing bottled water, and then he’d move toward the bedroom, loosening his tie, yawning, rubbing at the beginning of stubble on his cheeks. He’d then walk quietly into the bedroom and maybe not even notice the empty bed as he moved to the bathroom to prepare for sleep.

I waited without reading because I knew eventually he’d come looking for me, which he did. “Ellie?” he called out into the hallway.

“I’m in the sunroom,” I replied, and waited.

He then stood in the doorway and tilted his head. “You’re reading?”

“Yes,” I said.

He glanced at his watch. “It’s midnight.”

“I know,” I said. “Go on to bed. I’ll come when I’m finished.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I’m going to sleep. Try not to wake me when you come in. I have a huge day tomorrow.”

When I closed the journal the sun hadn’t risen, but its pre-light whispered into the room through the slatted wood blinds, thin strips of dawn gold announcing the imminent arrival of a new day. On the chair in the sunroom, I’d read and slept fitfully through the night and through my mother’s life: a life I knew nothing about. I’d discovered a woman I’d lived with and called Mother and yet never really understood at all; a woman who wanted a happy life, who arranged her years better than most cities are planned and yet found this: You can not make someone love you.

She was a woman who participated in the civil rights movement and went to college and loved and drank and laughed and then finally decided that cold perfection was the answer to life.

Every New Year’s Eve she wrote a summary of her year, a story sometimes and other years just a few lines, and then at the end of each entry she wrote her goals for the following year. She would check through the wishes and goals that came true or were met from the previous year’s entry. From the age of twenty forward, some variation of this wish remained unmet and unchecked: This is the year … He will love me.

Her grandmother had told her to write in this journal every New Year’s Eve in the nook below the stained-glass angel window in our family home. Often Mother wrote to this angel, but mostly she wrote to herself.