Chapter 12: The Yellow Room

Odette's spare room was at the end of the hall, behind a door she had never once left unlocked.

She opened it that night with a key on a ribbon around her neck.

I stood on the threshold with my suitcase in my hand.

The walls were yellow.

Not a pale yellow. A warm, sunny, buttercup yellow, painted by someone who had wanted a baby to wake up happy.

A white crib stood by the window with a quilt folded in it.

A rocking chair sat in the corner, worn smooth at the arms.

"I kept it," Odette said. "I painted it the week before you were born."

"You've kept it for eighteen years?"

"I touched up the paint twice. I took the crib apart once to paint under it, and then I put it back."

I set the suitcase down.

She crossed to the closet and slid the door open.

Eighteen small boxes stood in a stack, wrapped in paper, each one with a card.

"One every August fourteenth," she said. "My husband called me foolish. I told him I'd rather be foolish than not ready."

I touched the top box.

The card said, in blue pen, "Happy birthday, my girl. You are one."

The box below it said two.

Odette stood very still with her hands clasped.

"You don't have to open them tonight. They're yours whenever you want."

I opened the last one, the eighteenth, and found a small jar of her own best hot sauce with a ribbon around it and a note.

"Happy birthday, Ginny. I made this for you. Eat it on everything."

I laughed until I cried.

I hugged her, and she held on, rocking us both.

"I don't know how to be your mother," she said into my hair.

"I don't know how to be a daughter."

"We'll learn the order of things."

"Okay."

"Okay," Odette said, and let me go.

She went to bed at ten.

I didn't sleep.

I lay in the yellow room under a quilt that smelled of cedar, looking at the ceiling, and thought about Bella across town, in a silent house.

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