“Lord, yes. That woman once argued with the city for three months about a mailbox regulation.Three months, Scottie. Over the angle of the post.” I laugh, but she continues. “But she was the kind of stubborn that meant she didn’t quit on people and things. Ever. If she loved you, she loved you all the way through. No conditions.”
I look from Nan to the ground, unsure of what to make of all this.
If she didn’t quit on me, then why did I stop coming here?
Why did my mom, my dad,andI, stop coming here?
Turning my head to the side, my eyes land on the swing off to the edge of the property where I stood with Tucker an hour ago.
“She sat on that swing every morning,” Nan says, noticing what I’m looking at. “Coffee in a chipped mug she refused to replace. The swing used to sit right here.” Nan walks toward the spot in the grass just off the side of the porch and I follow her. She stops, circling where the swing used to sit. “She’d wave at everyone who drove by, which wasn’t many people on this side of town.” She laughs.
“She sounds…” I struggle for the word.
“Like someone who knew exactly where she belonged,” she says with certainty.
The words settle over me, hitting me right to the core.
Nan looks from me to the house, turning my body to face it with her. “She loved this house. Not because it was perfect. Lord knows it wasn’t. But she loved it because it was hers.”
I think about the way I’ve been looking at this house like it’s a project.
A checklist.
A deadline.
“I don’t feel that,” I admit, facing her again. “I feel like I’m borrowing it. Like I’m renovating someone else’s story for a show.”
Nan studies me carefully. “You know…memories don’t always show up the way we expect them to. Sometimes they’re not pictures in your head. Sometimes they’re instincts.”
“Instincts?”
She nods. “The way you stand in a room and already know how it should the look. The way you don’t want to throw that swing away. The way you fight for this place even when you say you don’t feel connected.”
My throat tightens and I feel my eyes burn with tears. “You think that’s her?”
“I think,” Nan says firmly, “that you are more like her than you realize.”
A breeze rushes through the air, rustling the pieces of tall grass that hasn’t been cut yet. We both look down at it and then Nan looks up to the sky smiling. “Millie used to say ‘just because you can’t remember something doesn’t mean it didn’t shape you.’”
“She said that?”
Nan shrugs. “Among a lot of other things. Some of which I can’t repeat in polite company.”
I force a laugh because I know she’s trying to bring me backto the present. She’s trying to help me get my head out of this space I’m currently trapped in. But her words cling to me. I’ve been treating my missing memories like a failure. Like if I can’t replay a scene in my mind or hear her voice clearly, then maybe I didn’t love her enough. Clearly, Mimi Millie loved me enough to leave this house to me, but there’s nothing else she left behind for me to piece together the missing parts.
But what if love doesn’t work like that?
What if it’s quieter?
What if it’s in the way I refuse to throw out the swing. In the way I couldn’t get rid of the pink bathtub. In the way I still need pieces of the house to stay the same so that I can make it shine again for her.
“Nan?” I ask, pulling her from her face to the sky moment. “What if I fix this place up and it still doesn’t feel like mine?”
She smiles, stepping closer to me. “Then you keep living in it until it does. Homes aren’t built from memory, Scottie girl. They’re built from moments.”
My gaze drifts back to the yard—to Tucker adjusting his backward baseball cap now in deep conversation with Levi, to Lily smiling and handing out pastries, and to Dallas pretending not to let the kids win in whatever game he’s playing with them.
To belonging.
