“Oh, what lovely work you’re doing!” Ruth hears the teacher over her shoulder. “Are those going to be beads?”

Ruth turns. “What?” she says, glancing again at Isabelle. Two girls are talking at her; they seem to have forgotten their art. Isabelle has not moved a muscle.

“Beads,” the teacher says.

“They weren’t going to be, but I guess they could be.”

“Very creative,” the teacher says.

“Listen,” Ruth says. She points at her daughter through the glass. “That’s my daughter.”

“Yes,” the teacher says. “She’s the only one who hasn’t moved stations yet.”

“Would you mind telling her that she can move on? She’s very shy, and I just don’t think she’s going to raise her hand to ask you.”

“She’s going to have to raise her hand. That’s the policy. We’re trying to teach discipline as well as art. Discipline is an important component of art. Something all artists must have.”

“I understand that, but my daughter is eleven years old, and she’s very shy.”

“Well, she’s going to have to overcome that. We’re going to help her overcome that.”

Ruth reminds herself to breathe; she will not make a scene in front of these other women, who are absently scratching their paper with charcoal or fingering bits of clay as they discuss how hideous the new building at the bottom of the park is. She gathers her little clay balls together in her fist and squeezes them into a single mass, which she sets firmly back on the original pile of clay. She wipes her hands on her smock and then pulls the thing over her head and drops it onto her chair.

“We’ve been trying.” She snorts. “You have no idea.” She pushes through the door in the partition into the other room and takes her daughter by the hand.

II

Ruth’s dresser has become a collection of relics, things not so much kept as simply never thrown away, valued not in and of themselves, but because of their age, their attachment to the past. Or this is how it seems to Wilson, anyway. Tucked into the mirror frame is an old invitation to a cocktail party he can’t remember attending given by people they haven’t seen in years—people who might well have slipped forever through the cracks in his memory if he hadn’t been reminded of them by this invitation, which Ruth has kept—why? Likely first as a reminder to attend, Wilson thinks, or maybe because of the bird painted so delicately in the corner of the card, and then kept out of habit—or not kept, but allowed to remain.