Lilly was plenty nervous, so she decided to practice her lectures on me. Back in Korea, I’d tried making a voice for her in my head whenever I read the letters she sent, but it always ended up sounding like Meemaw. Some of what Lilly was saying now brought back pieces of her old letters. Even then she’d been trying to turn her ideas about photography into something solid. “The palm of the light” is one phrase I remember, as in you’ve got to put yourself in the palm of the light’s hand. When I read that back in Korea, it felt like Lilly was putting words to something that had been inside my own head for a long time, knocking around waiting for a name.

109. Portrait of her absence (closed bedroom door with packed suitcase), Cleveland, 1974

LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, DECEMBER 1974: I wish I could say Christmas went well, but Jane was distant and distracted the minute she stepped off the plane. Poor Mother thought it meant she hadn’t given Jane a warm enough welcome, but all it really means is that Jane has turned into a selfish drip. With Father gone, she doesn’t hide her smoking, and while I used to worry about how much of herself she kept hidden, now she seems to be going out of her way to make her grandmother as uncomfortable as possible—or, worse, she isn’t thinking of her grandmother at all. Jane waited until she arrived to announce that she’d become a vegetarian, which meant she wouldn’t eat most of what Mother had cooked. I’ve been working steadily since the café show; I was looking forward to asking her into the darkroom with me like old times, until Mother offered to take her shopping and she giggled. “That’s okay, Dot,” she said, as if her grandmother had made a joke. I realized that this Jane was not someone I wanted to share a darkroom with.

I’d thought I was doing Sam a favor, inviting him to Christmas dinner, but really it was the other way around. What he said about Mother’s cooking almost made up for Jane not eating it. He distracted us from Jane’s behavior and Father’s absence with stories of Christmas with his grandmother when he was growing up. When he sang a Glenn Miller song that he and his meemaw had liked, he even got Mother to join in at “Woo, woo, Chattanooga, there you are.”

I tell myself this will pass: Jane is still growing up. This is merely the twenty-year-old version of her wearing an ugly blue coat for most of third grade. Meanwhile, my pride and my irritation are constantly banging into each other. I love my daughter deeply, but right now it’s hard to like her very much.