The rest of his eulogy was brief, highlighting the things he loved best about Blythe, the things he would miss the most. He knew the words were not enough, but they were all he had to pay tribute to his one and only child.

“I am quite certain I will never laugh without hearing her laugh. I will never smile without seeing her bright smile. I’m grateful to all of you for being a part of her brilliant, precious life. I feel sorry for those who missed out on knowing this exceptional person.” A gasp of sorrow built in his chest and he paused, then spoke again. “In a moment, you’ll hear from another exceptional person. Of all the gifts my daughter gave to the world, the greatest is her own daughter, Natalie.”

Andrew kept himself steady as he stepped back, though his knees threatened to give out. A new song started up, Natalie accompanied him back to his seat, and he sank down with as much dignity as he could muster.

“I’m up next,” she said, “and I have no idea how I’ll follow that.”

Her tears were silver tracks of grief salting her achingly lovely face. Blythe’s face. One and the same, and maybe this was the reason he was confused sometimes. He held tightly to the top of the cane as “What a Wonderful World” filled the hall. He didn’t really need the cane, but by now it was a habit. And maybe a way to keep himself from drifting away forever, on a raft of unutterable sadness.

Natalie didn’t sing along with the rest of the gathering as she awaited her turn at the podium. Instead, she time-traveled, trying to visit her mother in a different era, trying to bring her back to life.

When Natalie was little, her mother had dwelled at the bright center of her world, an incandescent force organizing their lives around books and ideas.

Even at a very young age, Natalie had understood that this was unusual. That their family was unusual.

She remembered a time when she was in the fourth grade—Mrs. Blessing, California History—and came home in a quandary: “We’re doing family trees in school,” she told her mother, “and I feel weird about mine.”

“Why do you feel weird about it?” Blythe quite frequently responded to Natalie with a question about her feelings. She read tons of parenting books and got all kinds of ideas from them.

“Kayla says we have an alternative lifestyle. She told everyone at recess that means we’re freaks.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Mom remarked, smoothing her hand over the pages of an antique book. She liked to display the most special collector’s items in a lighted glass case under the counter. People who wanted a closer look had to ask, and they had to wear white gloves when they touched the pages.