“I don’t think so, baby.”
“Good,” said Amelia, ten years old, matter-of-fact. “She smelled like a car.”
Then she climbed onto my lap, which she is getting too big to do and does anyway, and put her head under my chin, and said, into my shirt, “Was that my mom?”
“That was your mom.”
“Huh,” said Amelia. “I thought she’d be taller.”
And Greta came the rest of the way down the stairs.
She came into the kitchen, and she sat down in the chair Katherine had just left — deliberately, I think; Greta does most things deliberately — and she put her book on the table, and she looked at me.
“You knew I heard,” she said.
“I knew.”
“Ten years.”
“I was waiting for you to want to say it.”
“I didn’t want to say it,” Greta said. “I wanted her to.”
She was crying, then, in the way she does, which is angrily.
“Dad. Why the bracelet? Why’d you look at the bracelet?”
I thought about how to say it.
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