“Okay,” she said.
“What happens now?”
And I said the truest thing I have ever said to my child.
“Now we get to decide where we go next.
That’s the whole thing.
That’s what it was always for.”
We got lunch in Manitou Springs on the way home and she ordered a milkshake before the food came, on the grounds that the day had been emotionally significant.
That became a thing we do.
Every year on Rebecca’s birthday — the fourteenth of June — we go somewhere neither of us has ever been.
That’s the only rule.
It doesn’t have to be far and it doesn’t have to be good.
We’ve done a mineral museum in Golden that took nineteen minutes.
We’ve done a hike neither of us enjoyed.
We’ve done a Vietnamese place in Denver where we both ordered wrong and ate it anyway.
Dessert comes first.
That was Hannah’s amendment, in year two, and it is now non-negotiable.
It works because it is not a memorial.
Nobody has to feel anything in particular.
We just go somewhere new on her mom’s birthday, and Rebecca stays a thing we are still doing rather than a thing we sit and look at.
Part Sixteen: What My Daughter Said in Front of Her Class
A year after Pine Crest, Hannah’s fifth grade did a unit on family history.
Every kid built a poster.
Parents were invited for the last forty minutes on a Thursday afternoon and I got there late, in uniform, because there had been a thing, and I stood at the back with eleven other adults.
Her board had three photographs.
Rebecca, in the Oregon one, holding a two-year-old upside down.
Me, in dress blues, which she had chosen over a much better photograph of me because, she informed me, “it’s more impressive.”
And one of the three of us — Samantha, Hannah and me — on a picnic blanket at Bear Creek the previous August, taken by a stranger, in which all three of us are squinting.
At the end there were questions, and a boy in the second row asked her, without any malice at all, whether she ever wished she had a normal family.
Hannah looked at her poster for a second.
Then she looked at the back of the room, at me, and then back at him.
