“No.” I’d started to cry but stopped myself. “This is crazy. Stop it. Hutch is the most amazing man I’ve ever met. Stop making him into someone else.”

Then Mother started to do something I’d never heard her do before: She began to weep. Words came between sobs. “Don’t hate me, Ellie. It’s not me you should hate. I just know.” She caught her breath with the skill of a catcher in a baseball game: victory the only goal. “He’s not right for you.”

A small meanness in me pictured Mother crying tearless and dry, her sobbing in sound only. “I don’t hate you, Mother. But I do love Hutch.”

My anger consumed me for days. I called Dad and asked him to please have a talk with Mother, to please make her understand that she was wrong and hurting me by not believing in me or my decisions. Dad proceeded, in his calm voice, to tell me that talking to Mother would do no good and only anger her further. Really, he told me, just let it go. She’ll get over it.

But she didn’t. She would call and plead with me, leaving long messages on my machine about my future and my decisions, about how I didn’t know how one decision would change everything. I chose the cruelest of all the actions I could have: no action. I ignored her, and I knew, of course, that this would make her insane. The anger between us grew as a living and fanged animal we couldn’t get past. Finally she called and apologized with words as dry as parched soil, telling me, “I hate for you to think I’ve been cruel. I will now respect you enough to let you make your own mistakes.”

That was as close to any apology as I would ever receive from her, and I made the choice to forgive because I knew there wasn’t anything more to come from her. That half-worthy repentance was the best she knew to do.

Soon after that, Rusty approached me in the library. Did my wandering start with Mother’s words or with Rusty’s invitation?

Where does anything begin?

I remembered these things as I wandered in and out of the art shelves, choosing papers and charcoals, pencils and paints. My pile on the café table grew beyond my two books until a woman came to ask if I needed any help. I glanced up at her and thought I must be looking at her the same way I would if she had woken me from a nap or dream—confused and bleary.

“Help?” I asked.