So I bring it up with Fritzie a few days later, as we’re combing out the tangles in her hair after her bath. “Patrick is sorry but his show is just too soon. Are you sure you don’t want me there?”

She looks away. “I’m sure.”

“But—won’t you be one of the few people there with no parent attending?”

“Marnie,” she says. “Patrick should come, but you’re not even my stepmother. If you got married to Patrick, you could come.”

“Oh, Patrick!” I call out. He can’t hear me; he’s in the studio. “Oh, Patrick! Darling! Could we run off and get married tonight, so I can go to the Parent Day lunch?”

“Stop it,” says Fritzie, and she looks like she’s going to laugh and cry at the same time.

Two days later, there’s an email in my inbox from Karen. Could we chat?

I call her from the Frippery.

“There are just a couple of concerns we have,” she says without even taking the time for any small talk. “Soooo, Fritzie has settled down nicely, is doing her work, and there hasn’t been any more stealing—or rather borrowing money. But . . . well, on the day of the Parent Day Luncheon, she asked if she could say a few words about her mother since her mom couldn’t be there.”

“I do not like the sound of this.”

“Yes, well, your instinct is correct,” says Karen. “She stood up and said that her mother was dead. Which I knew wasn’t true, but there she was, telling a whole story about how her mom died in a big accident. She actually had some of the moms in tears. So I interrupted her and said, ‘Now, Fritzie, you know that’s not actually true, honey,’ and she started laughing and said it was just a joke.”

“She wouldn’t let me come to the luncheon,” I say miserably. Just in case Karen thinks I’m terrible for not being willing to show up. “Because I’m not really her parent, she said.”

“I know. When we tried to talk to her about the luncheon beforehand, we told her that anyone important in her life could come. And that’s when she really got upset. We never see this girl cry, no matter what happens in the playground, no matter how scared or mad she gets, she just goes on forward, like some little determined optimist—but that’s when she started crying so hard and she said that Patrick doesn’t love her yet, and that he’s probably never going to love her, and her mum is gone for good.”

“Oh,” I say. I can’t think of anything else. I have to pinch the bridge of my nose to keep from crying myself. “Well, thank you for this.” I say we’re in difficult times . . . transitions . . . knew this would be hard having her for a year . . . We do love her . . . Patrick is trying, but he has an art show coming up . . . blah blah blah. It all sounds like excuses, even to my own ears.

After I hang up, I want to march right over to Patrick’s studio and tell him that he needs to shape up. Stop living apart from us! Open himself up! Emote! Love her! Love me! Where the hell is he when we need him?

For the first time since I’ve been loving Patrick, I feel like yelling and screaming at him. I stand there in the Frippery, listening to the voices of people out in the store, picking out their poinsettias, chatting with Kat about red bows versus gold bows.

And you know something? I do not care one bit about any of it. I get my bag out from under the counter, and I tell Kat that I have to go home. I need to refigure my life.

The next morning, when he’s getting his second cup of coffee in the kitchen, I tell him about my conversation with Karen. I’m trying to control how annoyed I feel. It’s one thing for him to be pushing me away, but Fritzie is his child.

He looks suitably chagrined. Or maybe it’s only his basic level of chagrin-itude gone up one slight notch.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he says. “I’m over my head here.”

“Show her you love her,” I say. “Take some time off to do something with her. You are her father, you know. Kind of all she has right now.”

“What are you talking about? She has you. You’re far better with her than I am.”

“I don’t count,” I tell him. “You and Tessa are the ones she needs to hear from. I’m a substitute.”

“Look, I don’t know the first thing about how to raise an eight-year-old girl! I told you that from the beginning. She wants things from me that I don’t know how to give her, and she never stops moving or climbing on things or making comments about everything. Everything.”

I look at him.

He picks something off the blanket, a little piece of fuzz. “Ha! I thought the worst of having a kid was going to be the teacher conferences. But instead it’s the random acts of crazy. What if she’s really a lunatic?”

I take a deep breath. “She’s not a lunatic. I think the things she’s doing demonstrate a whole bunch of spirit and a healthy reaction to what’s happened to her. She was abandoned and left here with virtual strangers. You just need to do more to show her you love her. Couldn’t you do that?”

He stares at me.

I reach over and take his hand before he moves it away. “I’m in this with you,” I tell him, because I think Blix would want me to throw in some reassurance for him, too. “You don’t have to go it alone.”

“Well, I have to do these fucking paintings alone, don’t I?” he says. “That’s the truth of it.”

“When the art show is over . . .” I say.

“If there’s anything left of me.”

“There had better be, Patrick. There had better be a lot left of you!”

“There’s already hardly anything left of me now,” he says. “Also, I don’t think I can have any more of this conversation right now.”

And then, you know what I do? After he goes back into his studio, I stomp around for a bit, cry a little, and fling all the dishes into the dishwasher. And then I get out the book of spells that I usually keep near the cookbooks when I’m not hauling it around with me. Blix’s book. I take a leaf from the African violet and a pinch from the eucalyptus leaf and some dried sage and put them in a little silk bag from the cabinet and put them in my pocket. And I say some words for a happy home spell.

Because when your heart feels like it’s breaking, it can’t hurt to have some eucalyptus, an African violet, and some dried sage on you.

Later, when my mother and I are walking from the subway to Best Buds, sipping our thermoses of coffee and shivering in the cold wind, she says, “I’m thinking of filling out an online dating profile. I’m ready to get out there.”

“Oh my God,” I say. “Can’t you people just please do what you’re supposed to do? Stop acting like you’ve all lost your minds?”

She looks shocked. “What are you talking about? I have not lost my mind!”

“You know,” I say slowly, “not to sound all judgy or anything, but when you were talking about having flings and all, I thought that was just your charming Southern hyperbole. You really want to date . . . like people besides Dad? Strangers, you mean?”

She laughs, a new kind of trilling laugh she’s adopted lately. “Yes, Marnie! Good God. I don’t call it dating when you’re out with someone you’re married to. And also, I don’t see your father here for me to go out with, so it would necessarily have to be with a stranger.”