I woke today with that question stuck in my head. It is something my mother said, each syllable clearly enunciated, when she felt unheard or misunderstood. She would stand there with her hands on her hips for emphasis.

My father and I often told her that, yes, she did. Her stories were often so confused-sounding, as if she couldn’t tell it all fast enough, high-speed versions about this or that neighbor and what was going on, too many pronouns to keep up with who was who.

Once, after a particularly long-winded tale that left my father sighing in exasperation, she went and got a piece of paper and a pencil from the kitchen drawer where she kept the grocery list and drew a picture of a stick woman (Mrs. McCarthy two houses over, who had seven boys), then drew an arrow to the stick woman’s stomach. “‘Another bun in the oven,’ is what I said. I heard it from Mr. Rosen, whose wife teaches one of those boys, whichever one is in fourth grade,” she said. She tapped the pencil in place and then repeated very slowly, in a way that made us laugh, “A bun in the oven. Hoping for a girl.” Then she laughed and said if she were Mrs. McCarthy, she’d be hoping Mr. McCarthy might find a hobby like stamp collecting or something and take a year off, and my father said he doubted collecting a few stamps would make a difference but certainly there was something he could do.

The older I got, the better I understood it all, my mother pointing to her galoshes by the back door and the two of them laughing and touching each other’s arms in a way that reassured me. I sat there at that small kitchen table picturing a fat baby girl (redheaded and freckled like all the McCarthy boys) baking away in the oven, while my mother did a little variation on the Lindy Hop, which she had been practicing, her stocking feet moving while she sang “I Got Rhythm.” Who could ask for anything more?

That baby was named Norman, and then the very next year they welcomed Maureen McCarthy, who ended up working as the librarian in your high school. “Small world,” she and I would say each time we ran into each other, and seeing her always triggered that memory of my mother dancing there in the kitchen, finger pointing to those galoshes that remained by the back door for way too long after she died.

It’s so mysterious where our minds take us. Your father has said that if he could attend one more archaeological dig in his life, it would be a tour of my brain and all that is hidden there. I told him that it’s a gold mine and that he would need every available tool!