"I know. Do you want to come in?"
She shook her head. "I can't stay long. I'm loading the car. I just wanted to say—" She stopped and started again. "I didn't know. About any of it. The letters, the realtor, the—any of it. She never told me she was trying to buy your house. I'd have told her not to. I got a job in Greensboro in September. Hospital billing. It's not glamorous, but it's mine, and we've got an apartment, and Milo starts pre-K there next month." She pushed her hair back. "I never wanted to live in Grandma's house. I mean, I loved it. But I didn't want to live in it. I think Mom wanted to live in it, through me. If that makes any sense."
"It makes sense."
"She's seeing somebody," Brynn said. "A grief counselor. Since November. Dad found her. She goes every Thursday." She looked past me, down my side yard, at the fence. "She's never really grieved Grandma. She just started running everything harder. The HOA, the house, me. My dad says she's been trying to hold the whole world in place so nothing else can leave."
Milo tugged her hand. "Owl," he said, pointing.
"There's an owl in that box," I told him. "Her name is Pinecone. She's asleep right now, because she works nights."
"Like a nurse," Milo said wisely.
"Exactly like a nurse."
Brynn almost smiled. Then she said, a little awkwardly, "Can I ask you something weird? The roses. Grandma's roses. Would it be all right if, sometime, I took a cutting? For the apartment. They have a little patio. I don't know if they'd grow in a pot."
"They will if you're patient," I said. "Come back in February, when they're dormant. I'll help you. Bring Milo. Take as many as you want."
She did. In the second week of February, on a cold bright Saturday, Brynn and Milo and Pippa and I stood at the gap in the fence with my pruners and a bucket of water and a bag of rooting powder, and I showed them how to cut a pencil-thick cane at an angle just below a leaf node and strip the bottom leaves and dip the end. We took eight cuttings. Pippa explained the biology of it to Milo in more detail than any four-year-old has ever needed. Milo nodded seriously throughout and then asked if Pinecone could have a cookie.
Through the whole thing, I was aware of Sheryl's kitchen window. The blinds were up. Somebody was standing behind the glass. She didn't come out, and I didn't wave, because of the no-contact order, and because I didn't know what a wave would mean, or whether I wanted it to mean anything. But she stood there the whole time we were cutting her mother's roses, and she didn't pull the blinds down.