The girl plucks at the strings of the guitar while she talks. “Dad says she was too sick to be my mom, so she had to leave. But you said once that your mom was sick and had to leave, and she came back as the cookie lady, right? So maybe my mom will come back too.”

Something Ruth used to say to me when I was a young girl crying in the middle of the night pops into my head. “Your mother must have loved you with her whole heart.”

The girl raises her head to pin me with a stare. “That’s what my dad says.”

I nod. “And he would know that best, wouldn’t he?”

She shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. He says that she didn’t have a choice.”

I want to reassure her, say anything that can erase the sad look in her eyes, but I can’t because the truth is probably closer to my own, and I know more than most that not all mothers are meant for the job.

My phone buzzes. Guitar lesson with Maree. Lesson #1 G to Em. The directive is a bowling ball, scattering my thoughts like pins. She stares at me, slumped over a guitar balanced in her lap. The buzz again, and while I’ve lost the fine threads of our conversation, I turn my thoughts to the task at hand. “Ready to get started?” I say.

Maree and I spend forty minutes together, which I know because I set a timer on my phone. I fill a page of my notebook with notes on what Maree did well and where she struggled, and I even include a line at the end that I think is very important information, so I draw a small star beside it: Maree loves her cat-eye glasses and Audrey Hepburn. It occurs to me when I’m writing that it feels close to the preparations I might have taken as a schoolteacher, and the idea that I’m teaching again in whatever capacity feels good.

“What are you doing?” Maree asks. We’re sitting in the kitchen now, and she leans over the table, elbows spread out like a newborn calf trying to stand. “That’s a lot of writing. What’s it about?”

“You,” I say with a smile. “If I keep good notes, then I’ll be more prepared for next time; plus there’s a few things you told me that I want to remember. Like the fact that you really love everything Audrey Hepburn.”

“Oh, wow! That’s great!” She pushes over a three-ringed scrapbook. “I’ll put that stuff in here, too, with my pictures.” She leans over the book to write, and her glasses slide off her face and hit the table with a plastic clunk. In one quick movement, she swoops them up and slides them back on her face. “How about we write some other things about me?”

I raise my eyebrows. “Like what?”