Dad was waiting for me outside Miriam’s office, not in Mom’s usual waiting-room chair, but on the other side of the room. I looked at the little table where Mom always piled her students’ papers, and I told Dad I wanted to call her. He nodded and handed me his phone. Mom’s number was already ringing. I sat down in her chair.

She answered, “Daniel?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Hi, sweetie!”

“Hi.”

“Are you at Miriam’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything good?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi! How are things going with Sonia?”

“Good.” I tried to think of something to tell her. I said, “We went to the museum. We saw the armor.”

“Oh, fun! How’s school going?”

“Good.”

“It’s good to hear your voice, honey,” Mom said.

“Yeah.”

Dad was holding my coat. After I said goodbye to Mom and gave him his phone back, he put my arms into my coat sleeves the way he did when I was little. It felt good. He zipped me up and tucked my hair into my hood. “Ready?” he said.

“Ready,” I told him.

Sisters

That night, Sonia and I listened to my grandpa read Harriet the Spy.

Harriet the Spy is one of the special tapes.

We lay straight back in our beds like the girls in Madeline. I pressed “play.”

Grandpa starts reading. But before he gets to the end of the first chapter, there’s a sound. The first time I heard it, I thought it was Dad’s blanket or something, brushing up against the tape recorder. But it’s the sound of Dad, crying, when he was little. When Grandpa stops reading, you can really hear it.

Grandpa says, “What’s wrong, Daniel?”

“I don’t know.” Now Dad is crying harder.

There’s a pause, and I imagine Grandpa rubbing Dad’s back, like Mom does for me. Then Grandpa says, “It happens sometimes. Like a passing storm.”

Dad keeps crying.

“Should I read?” Grandpa says. And I can’t hear an answer, but he starts up again. He reads to the end of the chapter, while Dad gets quieter. Then Grandpa says, “Better now?”

There’s no answer. But I always imagine a smile from Dad.

I clicked the recorder off and waited to see what Sonia would say. We just lay there, in the mostly dark. After a minute, I sat up and looked at her.

Her eyes were open and looking straight up at the ceiling. “I miss my mom,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That happens to me, too.”

Then she pointed at the tape recorder and said, “Play.”

—

In second grade, when I had Ms. Adams, we did an art project where we used crayons to color in every inch of a piece of paper—I did swirls, red and orange and yellow. Some kids drew rainbows. Some made squares, like a quilt.