Chapter 23: To My Daughter

Diane signed on Monday, in a room with a lawyer and a deputy, and by Wednesday the deed was mine again.

I stood in the foyer on Kenwick Road with a new key in my hand.

The marble was clean.

The pink balloons were gone, and someone had taken the slide out from under the apple tree.

Gabe carried the cedar box in behind me.

"Kitchen," I said. "Table. Both of us."

"Both of you," he said, and he went out to the garden to look at the gutters.

Jessa was waiting at the table in my mother's kitchen.

She had come from her aunt's that morning in a taxi, with one bag and the envelope she hadn't opened.

She had a plate in front of her, and she was turning it in a slow circle.

"It's strange," she said. "Being in her house."

"It's our house."

She looked up fast.

"Yours," she said.

"Ours. I'm not arguing about it."

I set the box between us and lifted the lid.

The envelopes lay in order, each marked with a year in my mother's looping hand.

Jessa slid her thumb under the flap of the first one, which she had carried for a week.

She read it once, silently, and then she put it down and took the second.

We read for an hour.

Sometimes she read one aloud to me, and sometimes I read one to her.

The year Jessa turned five, Margaret had written: You'd be starting school.

She had added: I bought a lunch box and I don't know what to do with it.

The year Jessa turned twelve, she had written: Today I drove to Zanesville and parked outside a school.

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