At the table in the breakfast nook, she sits across from me. The sun is bright against her back, and I can’t see her face. She asks me a lot of questions, what did Grimshaw do in Los Angeles, what did Mike do in Los Angeles, how was he connected to her job, what was my relationship with Mike like, etc. She cocks her head and laces her fingers around her coffee cup. It’s what she does when she’s carved out time to listen. I can’t answer her questions, though. The thoughts inside my head are clear enough, but conveying any of them to her seems impossible. Maybe I’m afraid all answers would bend back to me and what I did, and I don’t even know what I did. I just don’t feel ready for my own mother to find out how guilty I am. I chew on some of my breakfast—scrambled eggs and home fries and bacon—but none of it has any flavor. Even orange juice tastes dead. Mom watches me intently as I take a sip and then push it away. Coffee is good, though. She made it strong. That I can taste.

I follow the sound of her voice around all morning. It’s like a cord towing me along from room to room as she sorts through drawers and closets, making piles of old things. She tells me stories from her life, what a jerk her father was, how she met my father, how I remind her of him. She apologizes for not telling me more about him, but what do I care about a dead girl’s dead father? Her voice takes me from room to room, and I hang on to my mug of coffee with both hands. We go outside, and she takes a deep breath and tells me how much hope there still is in the world, even though it might take me a long time to find it again. I still have my whole life in front of me, and she’ll help me think about college. Maybe the right thing now is to take a gap year before college and do something with my love of French. Maybe Mlle. O’Shea will have some ideas for us. We end up in the backyard, where the sun is young and strong and the sky is enameled blue and the new grass and trees throb with green. Mom is still talking, now about the garden Scot wants to put in back here. He tried turning over a plot last fall, but the sod is so thick that even his monster tiller couldn’t bite through it. So we have to turn it by hand. I walk out into the middle of a patch of dirt clods and tufts of new grass. She wrestles a shovel out of the ground. It looks like it spent the winter there.