“I know.”
“So maybe she doesn’t know what I look like now.”
“She knows.”
“How?”
I looked at the headstone.Jade Lawrence. Beloved wife and mother. Two words attempting to describe an entire woman. Her laugh. Her stubbornness. Her ability to fall asleep with a legal brief on her chest and wake up knowing exactly where she’d left off. Her impatience with cheap coffee. Her deep, immediate love for all three of our children, including Billie, who had only gotten a few short years with her.
Especially Billie.
“Because she loved you,” I said. “And that kind of love doesn’t forget.”
Bianca looked down, blinking furiously, and CJ picked at the grass.
Billie slid off CJ’s back and pressed against my side. “Even if my hair is bigger now?”
I kissed the top of her curls. “Even then.”
“My hair is very different.”
“It is.”
“And I have more teeth.”
“She’ll be impressed.”
Billie nodded, satisfied with that. For a while, none of us said anything. Around us, leaves shifted, and birds sang. The world continued with unreasonable confidence.
CJ reached out and touched one of the flower petals. “I forgot how much she liked spring,” he said.
I knew what he meant.
Spring had always belonged to Jade. She was miserable through February, offended by the mud in March, then suddenly reborn the first time something green sprouted from the ground. She bought seed packets she didn’t have time to plant and opened the windows way too early, insisting that the cold breeze was bracing and not, in fact, miserable.
“She used to make lists,” I said.
Bianca looked at me. “Lists of what?”
“Things she wanted to plant, stuff that needed to be cleaned. What she wanted to do once the weather got warmer, and where she wanted to spend the summer.”
CJ smiled faintly. “Mom made a lot of lists.”
“She did.”
“She had a list of snacks to pack for when we went to the park,” Bianca said, her lips twitching into a faint smile.
“She had a list for everything,” I said.
Billie climbed into my lap without asking. “Did she have a list for me?”
I wrapped my arms around her. “She had a lot of lists for you.”
“What kind?”
I hesitated because the truth was too tender.
When Billie was born, Jade had kept notes about her feeding schedule and sleep patterns. That had morphed into a list of every little milestone, then ideas for the future, because Jade had always believed life could be negotiated into shape with enough ink and determination. She’d noted down books we should read to her, and which parks to visit once Billie was old enough to go down the slide by herself. Jade had even jotted down a reminder to buy more socks because toddler socks disappeared into another dimension when they were moved from the washer to the dryer.
