Janie came over often after that; she was a solid placeholder. She didn’t smoke nearly as much as my mother had, and she didn’t drink at all. She had a nice singing voice and was an excellent cook. She filled a chair and performed many tasks. She helped my father go through and sort my mother’s things. She cooked and cleaned and sometimes even spent the night, though I never saw her any way other than fully dressed. For a long time, I simply thought she had returned bright and early to cook our breakfast, and then I realized she was in the same dress from the day before, her hair down around her shoulders instead of pulled up the way she usually wore it. In the spring, she even made an Easter dress for me and embroidered the yoke with tiny roses, but by summer something seemed to have happened, and the stretches of time when we did not see her lengthened. Eventually, we heard that she’d married a man from Texas, and to my knowledge, we never heard from her again.

“It’s just as well,” my father had said. “She deserves someone who wants to marry,” something I would learn he was not interested in thinking about until I had graduated and left home.

Though our house was a quiet one and the food questionable much of the time, I took great pride in my father’s position, unsure if it was for my benefit or for his own; it occurred to me that the wilis, those grieving ghostly virgins in “Giselle,” did not have a monopoly on broken hearts. His weighed the same.

I wanted to ask who Janie had suspected my mother was with, but there never seemed a good time to interrupt the rhythm and security of the life we came to know. When he was sad or worried, I didn’t want to add to the burden; and when he was happy, I just wanted the good time to last. Then, before I knew it, he was an old man, and together we carried those fragile memories of my mother as gingerly as I do that brittle silver star on top of the tree. I bought it at Woolworth’s before either of you were born.

Shelley