their pleasure at being with other children and under the enlightening influence of other adults. “Maybe it’s Esther’s mom who’s the most ambivalent?” he’d said to Gina.
He was right, and it wasn’t just about camp—she was relieved when the next day, Esther reversed her decision; she was already dreading the days when Esther and Ben would leave for college. Surely this was not normal!
Esther was still asleep, curled facing the doorway. Every day she looked more like Paul, with her sharply contoured face and dark hair, but her long, flat eyebrows were from Gina’s mother. Gina opened the window curtains to reveal six scraggly petunias still wearing a few anemic blossoms. She’d planted them in the window box to mitigate Esther’s view of the neighbor’s brown siding, four feet away, but lately she’d neglected to water them.
She kissed Esther’s cheek. “Time to get up, Estie.”
Esther’s eyes fluttered open. “Did you look for a photograph for my project?” she asked.
“Not yet. But I will now.”
Gina left her and went down the hall to the study. The room was lined with books—volumes of architectural theory and monographs on the lower shelves, and above, novels—upright, piled, lying, leaning—but also photographs of family: the inheritance of a photographer’s daughter. She’d returned from Maine with a box of childhood photos and in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she’d been looking through them obsessively, the way one looks for something lost. Like the novels, the photos were stories that had already taken place. She wondered when she would she begin to select which stories to keep and which to throw away. Did people ever lose their fear of forgetting?
Now, in more than three decades’ worth of photographs, she was determined to find a recent picture of her parents alone for Esther’s project. But so far, Eleanor and Ron had shown up only in groups, usually with one of Gina’s children: Esther with grandmother Eleanor sailing the Cape Dory in Maine, Ben and grandfather Ron rowing the dinghy, Esther—a year older—with Ron and Eleanor, standing on their dock. Their stage for all these activities was the luminous cove that had always made everyone their photogenic best. In the pictures, her parents sparkled with jubilance; they had been jubilant, as though with their grandchildren they were experiencing the joys of parenting for the first time.
Finally, the perfect photograph appeared, taken on her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary—the diminutive Eleanor looking cheerfully up at Ron, who held her hands in both of his. A picture is worth a thousand words, she thought, and can hide a thousand more.
On the desk, the phone rang; Gina picked it up. “Dearie, it’s Annie Bridges. I couldn’t reach Cassie, and I bet you’re running around trying to get out of the house at this hour. But I wanted to tell you that the ‘for sale’ sign at your house is gone.”
“Wow—thank you, Annie, for letting me know. We all knew it was going to happen, but it still feels kind of strange.”
“It sure does! Well, I’ll let you go. We’ll chat at a better time.”
When Gina hung up, she was buzzing; Annie’s news had triggered the memory of Cassie’s call about her parents’ accident two months ago. After that call, too, she’d been standing here in the study, trying to fathom the loss, feeling as if there were something she should be doing but rendered helpless by geographical distance.
She turned to leave the study and glanced at the framed sixteen-by-twenty, black–and-white photograph of the cove that sat on the desk, waiting to be hung. As soon as she’d returned from Maine, she’d gone to look for it in the storage closet and had taken it to be framed. She resolved to put it up today, when she got home from work.
In the bathroom, Paul shaved; Gina put in her contacts. Ben came in and pulled out the stool to brush his teeth.
“I got a cancellation today, so I have a couple free hours beginning at eleven,” Paul said, rinsing his razor. “What’s your day like? Think you might be able to get away? We could go up to the property—it’ll be nice and warm there.”
A year and a half ago, they’d bought a place north of the city, in Marin, that they were planning to remodel and move into. Gina hadn’t yet been able to come up with a design she was happy with, and she knew Paul was getting impatient. She had the time to go to the property today. But she balked at the pressure it would put on her to get going on the plans.
Paul smiled at her in the mirror. “Aw, come on. The weather will be like summer there. It’ll be a good break for you,” he said.
Gina managed a smile. “Okay.” But she thought: what I really need is a break from myself. And a good night’s sleep.
Ben left and Esther came in and handed Gina a hairbrush. “French braids, please,” she said.
“Won’t it be nice to have a second bathroom?” Paul said.
“I like this,” Gina told him, wanting to counter his insinuation for Esther’s sake. She pulled the photograph of her parents out of her bathrobe pocket for Esther and braided, occasionally glancing up at her family in the mirror, absorbing the tender scene as deeply as she could. This was an unexpected side effect of sleep deprivation; she’d discovered it created a slower internal pace that made her more present in these ordinary moments with her kids.
Esther looked back and forth from the photo to herself in the mirror, her long eyebrows shifting up and down. “This is a perfect picture,” she finally said. “They look so happy.”
“See you in a few,” Paul said, kissing Gina goodbye after breakfast. Gina loaded Esther, Ben, and their springer spaniel, Stella, into the station wagon and drove to school.
At eleven, after a difficult meeting about expensive change orders with the Stones and their contractor, Gina left her office to pick up Paul. When she opened the car door, she was horrified to discover Stella panting and pacing in the back.
“Stella! Oh, no!” She’d brought Stella so she could come with them to the country, but had forgotten to take her into the office with her. She assessed the temperature inside the car: because of the fog, it was still cool. She poured bottled water into Stella’s travel bowl, and Stella lapped it up.
Rattled, she drove toward Paul’s medical office. Usually as she crossed town cresting the succession of hills, views of the pastel city and bridges would lift her spirits. Not today. The wind and gray muted everything: color, shape, expectations, the time of day, her mood. She was dropping stitches, getting flustered, feeling the glass half-empty more and more each day, and she couldn’t blame it only on lack of sleep, though that wasn’t helping.
She pulled into a loading zone near Paul’s building and watched him cross the street. Tall and athletically built with a cropped beard, he appeared younger than his forty-eight years. She noticed he was wearing his new Italian high-top shoes that he was so proud of.
“Boy, this car needs a good clean out,” he said when he got in. He gathered a binder, paper cups, and an old roll of drawings from the floor and threw them into the backseat. “Feeling okay?”
Gina rolled her eyes at him. “I think I only slept three hours last night. Also, my clients don’t need an architect; they need a shrink!”
Paul laughed. “I take it you just had a difficult meeting?”
“Not difficult, exactly. More like crazy. You know how the Stones’ house is set at the back of the lot? They’ve decided they want the garage to be right under the kitchen, so they have an idea about tunneling through the hill from the street all the way to the house. But the thing is, once they drive in, they won’t have room to turn around. They want a turntable installed so they won’t have to back out. It’ll mean months of grueling neighborhood meetings.”
“Is it legal to do that kind of massive excavation?”
“Sure. The question is, is it moral to blast away almost a thousand cubic yards of the planet just because you can?” Gina sighed. “All my clients