Colleen first took them to the ladies’ room and made sure they washed their hands, and then she bought a new bucket of popcorn. She bent over, hands on her knees, and told them, “I am the clumsiest person you’ll ever know. I trip over my own feet. Your mom made the cheerleading team and since they felt so bad for me, they let me be the mascot. I can’t dance. I drop things. So if you’re spilling things, then you’re just like me.” Colleen wasn’t sure how to speak to little girls, but truth seemed best.

“Grandy said you were nice. He was right.” That was Sadie and she said it with a smile.

Rosie popped out her hip and placed her hand on it, so sure of herself. “And we’re moving in with him. Did you know that, Aunt Lena? Now we’ll live on the river just like you and Mom did when you were little.”

“Yes, I knew that.” Colleen kissed Rosie’s forehead. “Now let’s go enjoy this movie about . . . what is it?”

The girls responded in a chorus. “The Jungle Book!”

All during the film, Colleen thought of little but her dad. Mowgli danced through the jungle with monkeys and tigers and wolves, but Colleen saw a montage of her dad’s life. Each and every memory now had a new color; a filter had been placed over them. Things made sense that never had before.

Either something is wrong with me or something is wrong with Mother. Colleen had said this to Hallie one afternoon on the swing set when they were probably ten years old. She heard her own voice saying it, a single thought that splashed into the afternoon.

“That’s so silly.” Hallie swung next to her, their legs pumping in unison, like everything they did in those days.

“It’s true, though.”

“Nothing is wrong with you.” Hallie dug her feet into the earth to stop her swing. “You’re just being all melodramatic.” She mispronounced “melodramatic,” making it sound like “mee-lo dramatic,” copying the word she’d heard their mother use every time Colleen felt something too deeply or was “too sensitive.”

“Maybe,” Colleen said and pumped higher and higher, wanting to make the swing wrap around the upper metal pole and back down again, the chain clanging as it flung her through the air. It never went that far, but she never quit trying.

In the movie theater, with the memory as bright and alive as King Louie on the screen, Colleen knew now: Mother had been trying to love another woman’s child. She had been trying to make her heart do something, and one cannot ever convince a heart to love out of necessity.

She closed her eyes, the sound of “The Bare Necessities” filling the theater.