Twenty minutes later, I found Nora in the supermarket parking lot.
She was standing at the back of a small blue hatchback, folding a paint-stained cloth and tucking it into the trunk. Next to it was a tall canvas bag with the handles of a dozen brushes sticking up out of the top.
The tall bag. With the sticks in it.
My legs felt borrowed as I walked toward her, holding Leo’s hand.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, before she’d even finished turning around. “I said terrible things to you. I thought…”
I couldn’t finish.
She didn’t need me to. She gave me a calm, gentle smile. The same one she’d given me inside, by the bakery. Only now I understood it.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Really. I’d have thought the same thing.”
“No. You wouldn’t have. I practically accused you in front of everyone.”
“You were scared.” She shrugged a little. “Mark told me you’ve had a hard year.”
She closed the trunk and leaned against it.
“He found me four months ago. Back in May. He saw a mural I did at the children’s wing of the hospital. The one with the hot air balloons? He tracked me down through my website. He showed up at my studio with a shoebox.”
“A shoebox?”
“Full of your mother’s photographs. Dozens of them. Her at the beach. Her in her garden. Her at the kitchen window with a coffee cup. He sat on my studio floor and went through every single one with me. He told me stories about her for two hours.”
My eyes filled up.
“He asked if I could put her on a wall,” Nora said. “So you could see her every night before you went to sleep. He said you’d stopped sleeping.”
I had. I’d stopped sleeping in May. I didn’t think he’d noticed.
“He paid in installments,” she went on. “He told me he didn’t want to touch the money in a way you’d notice right away. He said he wanted it to be a complete surprise. He was going to show you on your anniversary.”
Leo was pressed quietly against my leg.
Nora crouched down so she was eye level with him.
“And the stars,” she said to him. “Did you tell your mommy about the stars?”
Leo shook his head hard.
Nora reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a slender paintbrush. The bristles were still tinged with silver. She put it in his hand.
“Your daddy told this little man that Grandma loved the stars,” she said, looking up at me. “That she used to sit out on her porch with him and point out the constellations. So Leo’s been sneaking upstairs to help me paint them. Every single one up there near the ceiling, he did himself. Standing on a stepladder with me holding his shirt.”
Leo held that brush like it was made of gold.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell,” he whispered.
Nora smiled at him.
“You didn’t tell the important part,” she said. “You saved that for tonight.”
I knelt down in the parking lot, right there on the asphalt, and I pulled my son into my arms.
“Thank you,” I said to Nora over his shoulder. “Thank you. I’m so sorry.”
“Go home,” she said gently. “He’s waiting.”
My hands were still trembling on the steering wheel the whole drive home.
Mark was waiting on the front porch. He was sitting on the top step with his elbows on his knees. When he saw my car pull into the driveway, he stood up. His face was pale.
I got out. I unbuckled Leo, and he ran straight to his father and wrapped himself around Mark’s legs.
“Daddy, I told. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
Mark put his hand on Leo’s head. He was looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Kate, I’m so sorry. My phone died at the hardware store. I didn’t see your calls until I got home and plugged it in. Then I saw nine missed calls from you and I knew. I just knew Leo said something. I should have…”
“Take me upstairs,” I said.
He reached into his work bag on the porch swing. He pulled out a small brass key on a red ribbon.
We walked up the stairs together. Leo ran ahead of us.
Mark put the key in the lock. He turned it. He looked at me once before he opened the door.
My mother looked back at me from the wall.
Her eyes were exactly the way I remembered them. Exactly the way she looked standing at her kitchen window with her coffee, watching the cardinals at the feeder. Nora had painted the yellow curtains. The chipped windowsill. The little ceramic bird Mom kept there that I gave her in second grade.
Half of the wall was still bare drywall, with pencil lines sketched where the rest would go. A garden. Her tomato plants. Her porch swing.
And above it all, stretching across the whole ceiling, were dozens and dozens of half-finished silver stars.
Some of them were perfect. Some of them were crooked and lumpy. I could tell exactly which ones Leo had done.
There were drop cloths on the floor and jars of paint lined up along the windowsill. My mother’s old bedspread was folded on the guest bed. The shoebox of photographs sat on the nightstand with the lid off.
I lowered myself to the floor. I sat right down on the drop cloth in my work pants.
And I finally cried. Really cried. The way I had refused to cry for three whole months. The way I didn’t cry at the funeral because I was too busy greeting people. The way I didn’t cry in Gerald Pruitt’s office signing probate papers. The way I didn’t cry when the insurance check came in the mail with her name on it.
Mark knelt down beside me. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just put his arms around me and let me shake.
