For most of the morning, I let Erin teach me the complex laws of her drawings, which appear to involve animals with the wrong number of legs, houses with no doors, and trees full of what she insists are birds but look suspiciously like knives with wings. Heath reads from his upside-down book until he gets bored pretending, then moves to the floor near the table, not beside me, but close enough to correct Erin when she announces that horses have six legs if they are running fast.
“They don’t,” he says.
“They could.”
“No.”
“You don’t know everything.”
“I know horses don’t grow extra legs because they’re excited.”
I look at her drawing. “Maybe this one is very motivated.”
Heath gives me a look.
It is such an Alice look that I have to glance down before grief has time to show on my face.
He catches that too.
“Did Mom draw?” Erin asks.
The question comes softly, but it lands like a hand closing around my ribs.
“Yes,” I say.
Erin’s eyes widen. “Was she good?”
“She was better than me.”
Omar makes a sound from the doorway that is definitely a laugh poorly disguised as a cough.
I turn. “Are you choking?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
He looks toward the ceiling for patience. “The two of you are becoming a problem.”
“The two of us?” Heath asks.
Omar’s expression goes briefly blank, as if he has just realized he included the child in an alliance against him.
Erin beams. “We’re a team.”
“No,” Omar says.
“Too late,” I tell him.
Heath looks down before anyone can see too much of his face, but I see enough.
A smile.
Small. Quick. Gone almost before it exists.
Still real.
I do not know why that one nearly ruins me.
