The smell of wet yellow acrylic paint always stayed in the kitchen long after the brushes were rinsed. Mia sat at the oak table, her small fingers holding a fine-tip brush as she worked on the lid of a small wooden chest. She had already painted the sides a deep, dark blue, the color of the river just before dusk.
I kept my hands in the warm soapy water, scrubbing the oatmeal bowls from breakfast. The window above the sink looked out over our small backyard in Oakhaven, where the grass was already browning from the late August heat.
“Mom, is this blue too dark for a cover?” Mia asked.
She rubbed the hem of her yellow t-shirt with her left hand, leaving a tiny smudge of blue acrylic near the seam.
“I think it looks like the night sky,” I said, turning to smile at her. “It is perfect for whatever you decide to put inside.”
She nodded once, her movements deliberate and careful. She was only nine, but she held her brush with the serious air of a draftsman. Her late mother, my sister Alice, had been the same way with her sketchbooks.
“I am going to make a book to go inside it,” Mia said, dipping her brush into the water glass. “A book with rules for being helpful.”
“Grandma Eleanor will love that,” I said, though a tiny knot of tension tightened in my stomach.
Mia set the brush down on a paper towel. She looked up at me with her quiet, gray eyes, her brow furrowing slightly.
“Why doesn’t Grandma Eleanor have any pictures of my first mother on her walls?” she asked.
I stopped wiping the counter, my fingers instinctively finding my silver wedding band and twisting it around my knuckle. The silence in the kitchen grew heavy, filled only by the hum of the old refrigerator.
“She has a lot of pictures in her albums, Mia,” I said, keeping my voice soft and even. “Sometimes people keep their most precious memories in books instead of hanging them up.”
“But she has pictures of Cousin Beatrice and Uncle Gregory on the mantel,” Mia said. “And big ones of Dad when he was little.”
