“Thank you Mrs. Royal.” I smiled as I herded Lavi to the front door. “You have a very nice store.”

“Come back any time girls!”

She was too busy wiping the smudge marks off her bifocals to notice the little bulge in my backpack.

Franny

The letters arrived promptly every week.

Leah placed them on my pillow but never asked any questions. They were lavender, addressed to me and postmarked from a small town I had never heard of. One time I thought about looking it up, but the idea of me going to find Matilda seemed silly. I was always the one being taken care of, not the other way around. So instead I stared at the envelope, tracing the swirl in the F of my name, which was so exaggerated it looked like a lollipop from a carnival. I tucked the notes away inside a manila envelope pasted to the back of Matilda’s journal. My sister filled her letters with little tidbits of her life, things she ate for dinner, and what color she wanted to paint her room. She wrote like she talked and I would read her letters over and over before going to sleep, pretending I could hear her voice. I had gotten into the habit of using the purple pen to trace her words and soon the pages became so worn they began to fall apart in my hands, but it didn’t matter because I had already memorized most of them. Especially the last line of each, which never changed. “Remember my promise.”

I must have looked more distant than usual at dinner that evening. Engrossed in trying to spear as many peas as I could onto the tine of my fork, I dropped number five when Leah caught me off-guard. “Do you miss her?”

“Who?” I mumbled.

“Therese. Do you miss her?”

“I guess.”

This was the first time Leah had brought up anything about my mother’s disappearance. It startled me and I wasn’t sure how to react.

“Therese used to pose for me.”

I tried to imagine my mother posing for Leah. What had Leah seen in the curves of my mother’s face? My teacher once made us spend a month drawing trees. He told us that once we could draw one from memory we would own that tree. Was that how it was for Leah?

“Do you want to see some of my drawings?” she whispered, as though she was exposing something to daylight for the first time.

Even at nine, I understood the extent of the gift Leah was giving me. To show me images of my mother from her eye before she was my mother.

Before she deserted me.