“Your mom is so pretty, Blythe,” one of the girls whispered to me.

“She looks like an actress,” said another. I looked at my mother again and imagined what they could see, without the burden of everything I knew about her. I could tell by the way she tapped her foot that she wanted a cigarette. I wondered where her outfit had come from—was it in her closet? Did she buy it just for today? I watched my friends watching her as they sat next to their ordinary-looking mothers. For the first time in my life I was proud of her. She looked special. She was trying. For me.

The teacher handed out the flowers we’d made and the women fawned over our hard work. I held mine out to my mother and she read the poem under her breath. I’d never said anything like those words to her before. We both knew she wasn’t the best mother. We both knew she wasn’t even close.

“Do you like it?”

“I do. Thank you.” She looked away and placed it on the table. “I’ll have some water. Blythe, can you pour me some?”

But I wanted her to feel like a better mother than she was. I needed her to be a better mother than she was. I picked up the poem again and read it to her aloud, my voice shaking against the noise in the room.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re the best mom there is”—I paused and swallowed—“and I love you.”

She didn’t lift her eyes from the poem. She took it back from my hands.

“Five more minutes, class!”

“I’ll see you at home, all right?” She touched the top of my head, picked up her purse, and left. I saw Mrs. Ellington’s eyes follow her out of the room.

* * *

? ? ?

My mother made shepherd’s pie for dinner and still had on the peach suit when I got home. My father pulled his chair out and declared he was starving.

“So? Tell me all about the Mother’s Day tea.”

Mashed potatoes thumped onto his plate and my mother didn’t say a word. He turned to me and lifted his eyebrows. “How was it, Blythe?”

“Good.” I sipped my milk. She slid the hot casserole dish onto the table, straight from the oven, and dropped a spoon beside it.

“Jesus, the wood.” My father jumped up to grab a kitchen towel and burned his fingers lifting up the edge of the casserole dish to slip it underneath. He glared at my mother, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I made Mom some flowers out of paper.”

“That’s nice. Where is it, Cecilia?” He filled his mouth with potatoes and turned to her. “Let me see.”

My mother looked up from the sink. “Where’s what?”

“The thing she made you. For Mother’s Day.”

My mother shook her head, confused, as though I’d never given her anything. “I don’t know, I don’t know where I put it.”

“It must be somewhere. Check your purse.”

“No, I don’t know where it is.” She looked at me and shook her head again. “I don’t know what happened to it.” She lit a cigarette and turned on the tap to fill the sink for the dishes. She never ate with us. I never saw her eat at all.

My heart sank. It had been too much—I’d said too much.

“Never mind, Dad.”

“No. No, if you made your mother something nice, we’ll find it. We’ll put it on the fridge.”

“Seb.”

“Go find it, Cecilia.”

She threw the dishcloth at his face. The smack made me jump and I dropped my fork on the floor. My father sat there with the wet cloth hanging from him, his eyes closed. He put down his knife and fork and squeezed his fists so his knuckles were the color of the potatoes. I wanted him to yell with the same rage that brewed inside of her constantly. He was so still that I wondered if he was still breathing.

“I went, didn’t I? To the fucking tea? I was there. I sat at the little table and played along. What more do you want from me?” She grabbed her cigarettes and left for the porch. My father took the cloth off his head and folded it on the table. He picked up his fork and looked at me.

“Eat.”

27

The spring after Violet turned four, her preschool teacher asked us for a meeting after school on a Friday.

“Nothing of major concern,” she’d said on the phone, emphasizing the major. “But we should talk.”

You were skeptical from the start, although I knew a part of you was nervous about what she would say. What, she won’t share the glue stick?

We sat on tiny chairs and your knees nearly hit your chin. She offered us water in pink plastic cups that tasted like dish soap.

Everyone knows you open with the good news.

“Violet is an exceptionally bright child. She’s mature for her age in many ways. She’s very . . . astute.”

But there were incidents that had caused her classmates to be uncomfortable with her. She gave us the example of a boy who was scared to sit near her because she sometimes twisted his fingers until he cried. A girl who said Violet stabbed her thigh with a pencil. And that morning, during recess, someone said Violet pulled down their pants and threw handfuls of rocks in their underwear. My face grew hot and I covered my neck, sure it was blotching. I was embarrassed that we’d created a human being who would act this way. I glanced out the window to the playground covered with small, dusty pebbles. I thought of the aggression she’d shown when she was younger. Of what little empathy I saw in her now. I could easily see her doing it all.