Isabelle waits, holding her mother’s eyes with her own. They sit like this for a moment, and then her mother shakes her head. “I’m not even sure what I was going to say,” she says. “But I’m going to run to the bathroom,” she says. “Okay?”

Isabelle nods and turns back to the window. She reaches her fingers out to trace designs through the fog there, and this suggestion of drawing makes her suddenly remember her sketchbook and pencils on the chair in the corner of the classroom. She sits upright and whirls around to look for her mother, but she has already vanished into the bathroom at the back of the place. She reaches hastily down for her mother’s pocketbook to pull out the six dollars she knows they owe for their hot chocolate; she cannot sit here for another moment knowing her materials are where they are. She snatches the pocketbook up, and as she does, the shopping bag from the museum gift shop, which has been resting against it, falls sideways, and then, louder than the drone of background voices and the throaty idling of the bus outside, the beautiful, fragile sound of pencils rolling across tile fills Isabelle’s ears—the sound of her pencils, she knows, and she drops to her knees to collect them from where they have rolled out of the shopping bag and onto the floor. She clutches her pencils in her fist and, still on her knees, she rights the shopping bag, which contains, she sees, not only the Christmas cards but also her sketchbook. This she pulls from the bag, just to be sure it’s really there, just to hold it, and she is overwhelmed by a feeling that surprises her, not a feeling of relief or of gratitude, but one of an almost painful guilt. She pictures her mother through the glass of the classroom partition, bent awkwardly over her drawing, and then she pictures her mother storming, like an angry angel, it seemed to Isabelle then, through the partition door and sweeping Isabelle out of there. That she had remembered to pick up the sketchbook and pencils on their way makes Isabelle’s heart drop, and she feels her throat tighten around the familiar lump that has formed there.

“Isabelle,” she hears her mother say above her. “Are you okay down there?” Isabelle returns her materials to the shopping bag and sits down again in her chair, nodding. “I thought you might be hungry since we didn’t get our popovers.” She sets down a huge chocolate-chip cookie before her daughter. “Otherwise we can just take it home.”

Isabelle looks sadly from her mother to the cookie. Even though she isn’t hungry, she wants to say thank you. She wants to say I’m sorry. She wants to reach across the table and squeeze her mother’s hand or, even more, to bury her head in her mother’s shoulder, a familiar yet now distant comfort.