“What did you find?” my mother says excitedly as she joins me in the booth.

I hold up one of the teacups. “Check it out.”

“Oh, Livi, we have to get them, they’re gorgeous,” she says, picking one of them up and turning it in her hands, examining the fine details like I did. My mother hasn’t called me Livi in years, not since before I lived with Oma. But now doesn’t seem like the time to argue; we’ve come to a peaceful ceasefire the last few weeks since Aunt Sarah’s been gone.

I pick up one of the cups and check the little white sticker on the bottom. “Yikes. They’re twelve dollars.”

“These are old, they have real gold plating,” she says, her voice reverent. “Just pick out your favorite.”

I only make ten dollars an hour at River Depot, and ever since I started I can’t buy anything without thinking about how many canoes I had to drag around to pay for it. And this seems like too many for a cup. I put the teacup back down. “It’s okay, my mug is fine.”

Mom shakes her head. “Don’t be silly. We need teacups. And I’m independently wealthy now,” she says, using my words. “Just pick out your two favorites and I’ll pick out a few too.”

I run a finger along the rim of a teacup. Am I going to let my mother buy me something?

She picks up two cups, a yellow and a green, both with silver rims and handles, and I pick a matching pair that are pink with gold. In the grand scheme of life, my mother owes me a lot of presents, so this is like back pay. Don’t overthink it, Olivia. I set my teacups in front of the seller, next to my mother’s, and she hands him a few bills.

He’s handing her change when she says, “Aiden seems nice.” It’s been a few weeks since she met him, and it’s the first time she’s brought him up.

“He is,” I say, taking the little brown bag of teacups when the man holds them out to me.

“That’s good.”

I expect her to keep peppering me with questions like Aunt Sarah would, but we just keep walking from booth to booth. At the end of the bluff Mom spends way too long sifting through vintage camera equipment. She tells me about the old camera body she’s buying, and how film is actually making a resurgence. About how she’s shooting a couple of weddings with film. And I realize this must be why she gets home so late on the weekends.