Everyone being so happy to see each other made it easy to treat our whole eight-year separation as some sort of fluke, what with Grandma touching my head like she couldn’t believe I was real, and Grandpa telling knock-knock jokes while I helped him sand and paint his model planes. At no time that summer did I consider the one-sidedness of the Grandma-didn’t-know-where-to-send-a-letter scenario. It didn’t take a Sherlock to observe that the porch in the old family photo featuring girl Lillian was the same porch that Grandma and I were sitting on to drink lemonade and read the funnies: meaning, Watson, that even though my grandparents hadn’t known where to find my mother those many years, my mother had known exactly where to find them.

But why dwell? I was eight. For the first time in my life, I belonged to a family I could count on more than two fingers. Besides, I wasn’t the only one not asking questions.

JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 1963: Your grandfather is thicker around the middle, and he and your grandmother have wrinkles where none were before. Your grandfather wears bifocals now, which he trades for a separate pair of magnifying eyeglasses to work on his planes. The house has been repainted, and there is new carpet in the entry. I was prepared for my room to have been converted into any number of things—a sewing room, a guest room, a second study—so it came as a surprise to find it unchanged. All my books and posters, all the random childhood objects—my souvenir pop bottles, my clay dog, my matching plush kittens—were pristine after ten years of your grandmother’s faithful dusting. I was surrounded by signs that time had stood still, yet there you were, asleep on the cot your grandfather had set up beside my childhood bed.

It’s almost funny how desperately curious and fearful your grandparents are regarding our New York life. They clearly can’t fathom how a woman can raise a child on her own without dying of starvation or embarrassment. While the truth (hard work, stubbornness, overwhelming love for you) might have put them a little at ease, I refused to answer a question they couldn’t bring themselves to ask. Luckily, you were an excellent distraction; and once you were asleep, we filled the time discussing the changes in the neighborhood, and the policemen and plumbers and clerks and lawyers who had married my high school girlfriends, until we could make an early show of yawning in order to retreat to our rooms without seeming too eager.

Awkward as it sometimes was for the rest of us, Squirrel, for you it is simple. You love it all—the green and the quiet, the uncluttered rooms and the unchanging schedule—and of course you love your grandparents, who love you back with a ferocity that makes it easier for me to overlook the rest.