“Could we talk about my mom?” My mother has always been a ghost, a small, keen entity who started her own interior decorating business when she was nineteen and built it into the kind of brand that artistically minded baby boomers wax nostalgic about today. It was the source for funky striped fabric loomed in Morocco, brightly painted wicker chairs, and geometrically patterned wallpaper. Her friends, dark-haired women with ruby lipstick and good bone structure, always said that she single-handedly brought color back to people’s homes.

She married my father at the courthouse when she was thirty, wearing a white suit. She loved pink champagne and never clipped her toenails over the garbage can, against my dad’s protestations. Her favorite film was Diabolique and she was always my dad’s first reader. She had a strained relationship with her sister and loved my cousin, her sister’s daughter, until she didn’t. She was obsessed with her own mother, a woman I’d never known but whose photograph stared back at me in the den throughout my childhood, luminous eyes so wily that she came alive to me. I’d touch her thin lips, my hand against the protective glass, and whisper my secrets to this long-dead grandmother. I cheated on a math quiz today. Or I don’t really like Clara Steele even though she thinks we’re best friends.

Everything I know about my mother was told to me in rare, intimate moments by my father, or shiny-eyed by her friends. They aren’t memories, and the older I get the fainter she becomes, a wisp of a shadow, barely a full silhouette.

Anneliese pauses mid-bite and glances to her left as if she’s worried someone else is listening. “Your mother was working a lot. And then she couldn’t, when she was sick. I wish I knew more about her.” She gazes down at her half-eaten food and twists another flaky piece off. She won’t meet my eyes and I know, instinctively, that there’s something she’s not telling me.

“Before she got sick, then. Any old anecdote will do.” I finish my coffee, licking the foam.

Anneliese sighs softly. “She was a strong-willed woman. She cared about her business and she was frustrated that she wasn’t living here full-time. You’d cry a lot for her because she was out so much. Then I’d let you crawl into bed with me.”

I nod and stay silent, hoping she’ll go on.