Maybe it’s that I don’t have a sister, I have a brother, and living with him is messy. I mean that literally.Skylar is ten. He spits globs of toothpaste in the sink, his clothes are all over his room, and he drinks milk directly from the carton, which makes Nans shriek.

My grandparents basically live with us now, which is a whole long story. Well, the short story is that my mother died two years ago. After Mom died, everyone was a mess, so Nans and Grandpa ended up helping out a lot. Their house is only a short drive down the street from us, so it makes sense they’re around all the time.

Even their dog comes over now, which is good because I love him, but weird because Mom would never let us get a pet. I still feel like she’s going to come walking in the door one day and be really mad that there’s a dog running around with muddy paws.

My mother was an artist. She was an art teacher in the middle school where I’m starting this year, which will be kind of weird.

There’s a big mural that all her students painted on one wall of the school after she died. The last time I was in the school was when they had a ceremony and put a plaque next to it with her name on it. Now I’ll see it every day.

It’s not like I don’t think about her every day anyway. Her studio is still set up downstairs. It’s a small room off the kitchen with great light. For a while none of us went in there, or we’d just kind of tiptoe in and see if we could still smell her.

Lately we use it more. I like to go in and sit in her favorite chair and read. It’s a cozy chair with lots of pillows you can kind of sink into, and I like to think it’s her giving me a hug. Dad uses her big worktable to do paperwork. The only people who don’t go in are Nans and Grandpa. Dad grumbles that it’s the one room in the house that Nans hasn’t invaded.

Sometimes I catch Nans in the doorway, though, just looking at Mom’s paintings on the walls. Mom liked to paint pictures of us and flowers. One wall is covered in black-and-white sketches of us and the other is this really cool, colorful collection of painted flowers with some close up, some far away, and some in vases. I could stare at them for hours.

I remember there used to be fresh flowers all over the house. Mom even had little vases with flowers in the bathrooms, which was a little crazy, especially since Skylar always knocked them over and there would be puddles of water everywhere.