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Claire hated her sandwiches cut diagonally.

I stared at it. It sounded true, exactly like something she would have done as a child. I could imagine myself cutting sandwiches into rectangles because motherhood was made of ridiculous accommodations no one thanked you for until years later, if then. But the scene itself wouldn’t form. I couldn’t see the plate, or my daughter at the table with her feet dangling from a chair, couldn’t remember whether she’d said it dramatically or simply refused to eat until the sandwiches were cut how she wanted.

I pressed my hand over my mouth as rain ticked against the windows.

I looked farther down the page.

Ben hated mustard.

I knew I had laughed when I wrote it. But when I tried to picture a lunch, a picnic, a school morning, anything with my pushing away a sandwich because it had been tainted with mustard, there was only an out of focus image.

I turned another page, although I knew I shouldn’t.

Claire called me from college because she thought she had appendicitis, but it turned out to be gas.

The actual memory was gone, as was the college, and her dorm room, along with the panic that must have been in her voice, the way I must have sat up in bed and reached for the lamp before Paul told me to put the phone on speaker because he wanted to hear too. I could infer it all. I knew how that night must have felt because I knew motherhood, knew the instant terror of a child saying Mom in a certain voice, but the actual memory had vanished into the mist.

I kept reading.

Ben climbed into our bed during thunderstorms. The handwriting looked like mine, but I could’t remember my son ever doing that.

The room seemed to tilt slightly, and I had to put one hand flat on the table until it passed.

Maybe my house would remain as Paul had?

But the streets came apart as soon as I reached for them. I could see the blue couch at home, the cassette in my hand. But the routes between places had begun collapsing. Streets I’d driven every week refused to connect. I remembered turning left near a brick church, but couldn’t name the road, nor could I remember the grocery store with bad parking and good produce, as the sign on the building blurred.

Restaurants folded into one another, Neighbors became categories. The woman with the hydrangeas. The man with the snowblower. The couple who always walked after dinner and waved even in January when it was snowing.

I closed my eyes and tried to walk through the front door of my house. For one hopeful second, I had the entryway. The table where Paul dropped his keys. The mirror I’d meant to replace but never had. Then the floor plan broke.

The kitchen was there, but I couldn’t attach it to the hall. The family room appeared separately, blue couch, coffee table, the spot where the Christmas tree went, but the doorway from that room led nowhere solid. Claire’s room existed as a blur of red, and my son’s room was a wash of green. My bedroom contained windows but nothing else.

I opened my eyes as the pool house snapped back around me with cruel clarity. The little kitchenette, the rattan chair, the faded rug, the table, and the pair of sandals near the door.

I threw the useless notebook in the trash and stood, crossing to the sink because I needed a glass of water. The faucet squeaked when I turned it, and the first rush came out cold enough to make my fingers ache. I drank from a glass decorated with tiny painted lemons, one my mother had bought in a set of twelve.

Then I thought of Paul. Not Paul from last night, but fifty-year-old Paul in the car beside me, his right hand resting on my knee at a red light while we waited near Shaker Square. I saw the hand clearly, broader than it was now, the skin marked by age, the ring on his finger, and the two fingers that were never quite straight after college. When they bothered him, his thumb moved over the same joint again and again while he watched the news or read something about the market he pretended was still relaxing.

That memory came easily enough that I reached for another.

Paul beside Claire’s hospital bed with a yellow highlighter. He’d sat in the chair by the window with a stack of discharge papers, highlighting instructions in yellow.

I could see the way he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, reading every word while pretending he was calm for both of us.

My daughter and the hospital bed were a blur. Paul was not, and I gripped the counter.

“Oh.”

The sound came out soft and surprised.

Young Paul was here. I had seen his hands last night, his face, and the way he stood still when I asked the question he didn’t want to answer. Maybe the younger version of him kept refreshing the older one, knocking loose pieces of the life we’d lived?

I didn’t know whether that was comfort or another cruelty.

I refilled my water then went back to the table and sat, letting ordinary memories through, the ones that no one would ever build a fantasy around.

Paul warming my car on winter mornings when he left before I did, complaining about grocery store layouts while still knowing exactly which cereal Ben liked and which yogurt Claire had decided was acceptable that month.