PART 5 — The Place We Saved for Lucy

“Grace,” Warren said, barely above a whisper. “Lucy died when she was three.”
He’d said it to me, but June was standing close enough to touch him.
She looked down at the girl she’d drawn on the steps.
“Did she die before I drew this?”
Warren took a moment to answer. “Yes. She died last winter.”
“But Maggie said she was coming.”
“What exactly did Maggie say, honey?” I asked.
June rubbed her thumb over the fold in the paper. “I asked if Lucy could come too. Maggie said, ‘Of course. We’ll ask her when we see her.’”
Warren closed his eyes. I thought he might put his head down on the table. Instead, he got out of the chair and knelt so that June could see his face.
“I wish you could have met her,” he said.
“Did she know about me?”
“No,” he said. “I found out about you at the bakery.”
June looked at me. “So I had a sister for three whole years and didn’t know?”
“Yes,” I said.

She sat down on the bottom step with the drawing in her lap. After a minute, she asked if she could get her blue pencil.
I thought she might want to erase Lucy or draw a line through her. I followed June upstairs and watched her climb onto the chair at her little desk. She spread the paper flat and bent so close that her hair brushed it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I never wrote her name.”
She printed LUCY beneath the little girl’s feet.
Then she asked me to stay while she brushed her teeth.
By the time I came downstairs again, Warren had picked up the chipped saucer. He was turning it in his hands, looking for the missing piece. It was on the floor beside his shoe. I picked it up and set it in his palm.
“Was Lucy Priya’s daughter?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I sat across from him. It occurred to me that I’d spent less than ten minutes with Priya since the bakery. In those ten minutes she’d told me about the sympathy card she once wrote me and never sent. All the while, she’d been coming home to a house where her own daughter’s things were still in the drawers.
“What happened?”
“An infection,” he said. “She was sick on a Wednesday. On Thursday morning she wanted toast. By Thursday night they’d taken us into a room with a couch.”
He looked down at the piece of saucer in his palm.

“I spend half my working life walking into rooms where families are waiting. I know which ones have a couch. I knew as soon as the nurse opened the door.”
He put the broken piece down carefully.
Then he told me Lucy used to keep a stuffed rabbit tucked under her arm while she ate. One of its ears had gone stiff from being dipped in applesauce. Priya had offered to wash it, and Lucy had said the rabbit was saving it for later.
I laughed. It came out before I could think about whether I should.
Warren raised his eyes. “That’s what Priya did the first time Lucy said it. Laughed so hard she had to turn around.”
We sat with that little girl between us for a while.
Finally, Warren looked toward the stairs.
“At the bakery, when I saw June’s face, for half a second I thought I was looking at what Lucy might have looked like at six.” He stopped and pressed his lips together. “Then you said her name. And I remembered the pancakes. I remembered suggesting June.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I knew exactly how old she was going to tell me she was. I asked anyway. I wanted another second before she said it.”
Upstairs, water ran through the pipes. June always left the tap on while she walked back to her room to choose a bedtime book. I usually called up to remind her. That night, I went up and turned it off myself.
The picture Priya brought
The next morning, I called Priya.
“June knows about Lucy,” I said.
For a few seconds all I could hear was a spoon knocking against a mug. Then Priya set it down.
“Who told her?”
“Margaret showed her a picture months ago. She told June they had the same father. Last night June said Margaret had promised Lucy would come with her to see the ducks.”
Priya asked me to tell her the last part again. When I did, she took a long breath.
“Lucy used to feed the ducks from the low wall by the library,” she said. “I haven’t been back there since she died.”
“I’m sorry, Priya.”
“Thank you.” Her voice caught on the second word. “What did June say when Warren told her?”
“She asked whether Lucy ever knew about her. Then she wrote her name on a drawing.”
Another silence. This one felt different. I could hear Priya moving around, opening something and closing it again.
“I have a picture you could show her,” she said. “Would she like that?”
June wanted to see it. She also wanted to know if she should put away the stuffed animals on the couch before Priya came. I told her we could make room for everybody. She moved her bear to the middle cushion and left him there.
Priya arrived that afternoon with a photograph tucked inside a library book to keep it flat. In it, Lucy wore a yellow raincoat and stood beside a puddle, holding her rabbit out by one leg. The rabbit had a wet patch on its head.
“Did she drop him?” June asked.
“She wanted him to jump in the puddle too. She said it was his turn.”
June leaned closer to the picture. “I have that coat.”
“You do?”
“Mine has a tear in the pocket.” June ran to get it. When she brought it back, she turned the pocket inside out and showed Priya where I’d tried to sew it. “Mom did it with purple thread because we couldn’t find yellow.”
Priya touched the stitches. I saw the tears gather in her eyes before June did.
“Are you sad because I have her coat?” June asked.
“I’m sad because I miss seeing her in hers.” Priya looked up. “I’m glad yours has a purple pocket.”
June considered this. Then she set her coat on the couch beside the bear and asked if Priya wanted to see the drawing.
Priya looked at it for a long time.
“You can have it,” June said, with the quick generosity of a child who’d just realized a grown-up was hurting.
Priya looked at her. “Would you like to keep it?”
June’s eyes went back to the paper. “A little.”
“Could I take a picture of it, then?”
June held down the corners so Priya could get all of it in the frame. Then she asked if they could take one more, because her thumb had covered the rabbit.
At the door, Priya told me she’d been staying with her sister since the morning she brought me Margaret’s card.
“Warren and I have talked,” she said. “We’ve spent months trying to get through a day without saying the wrong thing about Lucy. Then I heard what he’d told me about you, and I thought about how easily I’d let him decide which conversations I could handle.”
She looked back into the living room. June was lining up her bear and the raincoat so she could take a picture of them too.
“I’ve ended things with him,” Priya said. “We’re going to have dinner on Lucy’s birthday. We decided that together.”
I nodded. I could imagine how much it had cost both of them to make that small plan.
Priya had come to my door twice now. The first time, she’d brought me something I wished I’d never had to see. This time, when I thanked her for coming, I wanted her to hear me.
So I said it again after she turned around.
What Margaret had to say herself
Margaret called on Sunday. I had June’s cereal bowl in one hand when I answered, and for a second the ordinary weight of it made me angry. Margaret had watched my child learn to walk and talk from whatever distance she could manage. She’d had years to knock on the door. Now I was standing in my kitchen holding a bowl with a cartoon dinosaur on it, and she wanted to talk about the day she’d nearly walked out of a school with my daughter.
“Start with the tow truck,” I said. “How did you know?”
“I heard your message at the front desk.” Her voice was thin but clear. “I’d come to drop off a book June said she wanted to read. The receptionist played the messages back while I was there. I heard you say you were waiting for a tow. I went outside and called from Warren’s phone.”
I set the bowl down.
“You heard something you could use.”
“Yes,” she said.
She didn’t ask me to understand how it had felt to stand there and hear my voice. I’d expected her to. Almost everything Margaret had ever said about a mistake began with what somebody else had done first.
“Why did you tell her Lucy could come to the ducks?”
On the other end of the line, she started crying. I waited.
“June asked me if Lucy liked her. I said she would. Then she asked if we could all go together. I could see she was picturing it. I let her go on picturing it because I wanted to for another minute.”
“You left her to find out from Warren.”
“Yes.”
“And my letter?”
“I refused it. I knew what it was likely to say.”
I looked toward the hallway. June had lined up her shoes on the mat with the toes pointing toward the door. She’d begun doing that after our first trip to the park with Warren. She said it made getting out faster.
“I spent that Friday waiting for somebody to sit down beside me,” I told Margaret. “You were there.”
“I was.”
“You could have sat down.”
For a moment, she made no sound at all.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I could have.”
I asked her to put in writing what she’d done at the school. She brought it to my house two days later. She signed it at my kitchen table, and I took it to the principal myself. Margaret also wrote a letter to June. I read it first, then asked June if she wanted to hear it. She said yes, as long as I read it while we were doing something else. We folded towels on the living room rug.
Dear June,
When I said your dad sent me, I told you something that wasn’t true. When I said Lucy could come to see the ducks, I told you something I already knew couldn’t happen. You believed me because I was a grown-up you knew. You did nothing wrong.
I’m your grandmother. I should have told your mom I wanted to meet you. From now on, I’ll speak to her first and let you decide if you want to see me.
I’m sorry I made you wait for people who weren’t coming.
I finished reading. June tried to fold a bath towel in half and got one corner twisted inside. I waited while she pulled it out.
“Is she still Maggie?” she asked.
“You can call her Maggie. You can call her Margaret. You can take some time to decide.”
“I’ll call her Maggie in my head for now.”
She handed me the folded towel. We found room for the letter in the drawer.
The things Warren learned to ask
Warren called that Sunday at four, the time he and June had agreed on. She asked him if he thought a dog could get a job opening a bridge. He started to explain how a bridge worked, and she interrupted to say that she would push the button and the dog would be in charge of lunch.
“That sounds like a better job than mine,” he told her.
The following Sunday he called again. June left him on speaker while she built a tower out of blocks. Sometimes she talked for two minutes. Sometimes she forgot he was there until the tower fell and he asked how many blocks she’d managed to stack.
Their visits stayed short at first. He came to the library with us and discovered that when June asked him to guess which book she wanted, she meant to take him through every shelf until he got it right. He learned that if she said she wanted to do up her own zipper, he could hold the bottom of her coat steady and give her time.
Once he had to miss a Saturday. He called on Thursday and told her himself.
“Will you still come the Saturday after?” she asked.
“Yes. Do you want me to put it on your calendar when I see you?”
“Mom already put it there,” she said. “I wanted to hear you say it.”
He did. Then he came.
One evening, after June went upstairs, Warren pulled a folded sheet of paper from his coat. He’d written down questions about how he could help with school expenses, what he could contribute every month, and how we might make arrangements June could count on.
“I can take this to my lawyer,” he said, “or you can look at it first.”
I unfolded it. The only thing I could think about for a moment was the stack of papers he’d set on the bed the morning he left, and how quickly he’d put a pen in my hand.
“I want time to read it,” I said.
“Of course.”
He stood and put on his coat. At the door, he stopped.
“Did you ever wish you’d asked for something different in the divorce?”
“Yes.”
He waited.
“I wish I’d asked you to answer the phone if I ever needed to call.”
His hand fell from the doorknob.
“I would have said yes,” he said.
“I know you would have.”
Neither of us moved for a while. Then he asked if he could take June to see the ducks the following weekend, with me there.
“I’ll ask her in the morning,” I said.
He left his list on the table for me to read.
The morning we saw the ducks
June wanted to go. She asked me to invite Priya too.
“She knows where they are,” June said, setting out her cardboard binoculars and mittens. Then she thought about it for a moment. “And she might want to show us where Lucy stood.”
Priya met us at the low wall in her old gray coat. For a while we just watched the water. The ducks were on the far side of the pond, coming and going behind a patch of reeds. June raised her cardboard binoculars. The tubes went crooked as soon as she held them up. Warren steadied one end, and she found the ducks.
“Was this Lucy’s spot?” she asked Priya.
“A little farther down. See where that stone sticks out? She liked to put one foot on it and tell me she was the tallest person in Chicago.”
June walked over, put a foot on the stone, and looked back at us.
“Slightly taller than your father,” Priya said.
June laughed. So did Warren. I saw Priya look at him when he did. For an instant they both seemed to be listening for somebody else to join in.
June climbed down and opened her backpack. She took out her drawing, folded small enough to fit beside the juice box.
“I brought her because I wanted to show her the ducks,” she said. She looked up at Priya. “I know it’s the paper.”
“I’d like to hold it while you look,” Priya said.
June gave it to her. Priya unfolded it and stood at the wall with the drawing in both hands. When a duck finally came close enough for June to see the water bead on its back, Priya turned the paper a little toward the pond.
I saw Warren put a hand on the wall and bow his head. I could have looked away. For years I’d thought that was what I’d do if I ever saw him cry over something he’d lost. Instead, I stayed beside him and watched the duck put its head under the water.
A minute or two later, June came back for the drawing. She folded it along the old creases and put it away herself. Then she asked if we could get pancakes.
Seven candles
June turned seven on a Sunday in May. For her birthday, she asked for breakfast at home with everybody she’d invited. Ellen brought strawberries. Priya brought a book about bridges. Margaret came for the first half hour because that was what June wanted. In the weeks before the party, they’d seen each other twice at the library with me beside them. The first time June had asked Margaret to read. The second time she’d read to Margaret.
When Margaret arrived, she handed June a card with a crooked dog on the front. She waited while June opened it.
“What does it say?” Ellen asked.
June read it out loud. “Happy seventh birthday. Love, Maggie.”
Then she counted the candles Ellen had put out beside the pancake batter and went to find another. Ellen had brought six. She’d known June for every minute of those six years and was having as much trouble as I was getting used to the seventh.
Warren had asked if he could make the pancakes. The first one burned because he was listening to June tell Priya about a dog that had gotten into her school playground. He scraped it into the trash, turned down the heat, and started again.
June dragged a chair over to the counter.
“Can I do the blueberries?” she asked.
Warren handed her the bowl.
“Put a few in the middle,” he said. “That way there’ll still be some left after you eat the corners.”
She looked up at him. “How did you know I eat the corners first?”
“Your mom told me.”
He glanced across the kitchen at me. I remembered him at seventeen with the little mark by his eyebrow and grass stuck to the back of his shirt. I remembered him carrying one suitcase out the door. And I thought of him standing by the pond with his head down while one daughter watched the ducks and the other lay on a page between Priya’s hands.
June picked a blueberry out of the bowl and ate it.
“Dad,” she said, “you’re going to burn this one too.”
Warren stood perfectly still for a beat. Then he slid the spatula under the pancake and flipped it. June kept dropping blueberries into the next one. I don’t think she knew what she’d just done to him. She was busy making sure hers had enough berries.
After breakfast, Ellen helped June tape the birthday cards to the refrigerator. June left a little space among them, went upstairs, and came back with the old drawing. The paper had gone soft along the folds.
“I want this one here too,” she said.
She put it up with two magnets so we could see the whole page. Warren on the steps with his suitcase. June in her braids. Lucy holding her rabbit by one leg.
That evening, when the plates were washed and everybody had gone home, June asked me to open her bedroom window a crack. The air was warm enough. Somewhere beyond the houses, a train was passing.
A car slowed outside. Its headlights moved across her ceiling.
She turned her head toward the window, and I thought of all the nights she’d lain in that bed listening for a man who didn’t know she was there.
“That’s probably Ellen,” she said. “She forgot her strawberry bowl.”
We listened. The car rolled on. June pulled up her blanket and reached for my hand.
“Dad said he’ll be here Saturday at ten,” she said. “Can you wake me if I sleep late?”
“I will.”
She closed her eyes. I stayed until the train had passed and her hand went slack in mine. By then the street was quiet, and June was asleep.