She said music could hold the sad for you when you didn't want to carry it yourself. Clare thought about that. Your mother sounds like she was a wise woman. She was. Lily was quiet for a moment.
She was really funny, too. People don't say that about her. They say she was kind and she was beautiful and she was good. But she was also really funny. She used to make P laugh so hard he'd have to put his coffee down.
Clare smiled at the window. Tell me something funny she did. Lily looked up surprised like this was not a request she had anticipated. Then something came alive in her face. Something that had been waiting for permission.
One time Lily said she put salt in the sugar bowl because P had been teasing her about something all week and she wanted to get him back and he put it in his coffee without noticing and took a big drink and Lily started a bright helpless laugh that seemed to catch her off guard. His face, she said. She used to tell that story. His face was the funniest thing she ever saw. Clare laughed too genuinely.
That's a good one. She said she was the best at tricks. Lily wound the music box again, the dancer beginning its small rotating motion. P never got mad about it. He'd always just shake his head and try not to smile.
She paused. He doesn't smile much anymore. He's getting better at it, Clare said. And she kept her voice even because she was not going to make something of that in front of Lily. But it was true.
Thomas smiled more. Small smiles, brief ones, but they were there. Lily looked at her with the particular directness that was her characteristic mode. "Do you like him?" She said.
"Ph?" Clare turned from the basin with measured calm. "I respect your father a great deal," she said. "He's a good man." "That's not what I asked," Lily said.
Clare looked at this 9-year-old with her direct gaze and her mother's dark hair and the music box in front of her playing its thin sweet song and she felt something in her chest do a complicated maneuver. Lily, she said, some questions are too big for a kitchen on a Sunday evening. Lily considered this. Okay, she said with the tone of someone filing the question away for later, but I'm going to ask again. I suspect you will, Clare said.
Jacob brought the trouble home on a Monday. He came in from school at his usual time, but the way he came in was wrong. Two quiet, too contained, moving past the kitchen without stopping his school bag held too tightly against his side. Clare was at the stove and she registered all of it in the moment he passed the doorway. And she set down the spoon she was holding.