That was early October. After that it got worse, or more, I don't know what to call it. My mother talked about the Hessler constantly. She looked up the other four finalists online and reported on them like a sports announcer. There was a boy from Meadville who did charcoal portraits of his grandfather that were, honestly, really good, and my mother said they were "very nice for charcoal," like charcoal was a disability. She asked Mr. Szczepanski what he'd charge to frame mine if it won, and Mr. Szczepanski said for her, nothing, and she cried in the frame shop. She asked me every night how the picture was going. She'd come in from her route at nine-thirty with her headlamp still on her forehead and the first thing she'd do, before she took her shoes off, was go stand in front of the panel.
"Look at that," she'd say. "Look at me, with my feet in the dishpan. You made me look like a painting."
"It's not a painting."
"You know what I mean. You made me look like somebody."
And Krista would be upstairs, and her door would be closed, and sometimes if I was on the landing I could hear her through it, not crying, nothing like that. Just walking. Back and forth. Like someone waiting for a bus.
She'd gotten thin. I'll say that now because I noticed it then and didn't say it. She wore the Northlake sweatshirt every single day, the same one, and it hung on her. She stopped eating breakfast. She came home at three-thirty every afternoon, never earlier and never later, and once in late August I saw her at the mailbox at two in the afternoon, on a weekday, when she should have been in lab, and when I said something she said, "Lab got canceled. The professor has COVID," and I said "Again?" and she said, "It's going around, Mare," and went inside. Her backpack never got any heavier. Last year she used to complain that it weighed a hundred pounds and her chem book alone was eight. This year it hung off her shoulder like there was nothing in it. I noticed that. I swear to God I noticed it and I thought, she must be using the e-book.
I think the thing about noticing is that it doesn't count if you don't do anything with it. I think noticing without doing anything is just a way of being able to say later that you noticed.
So: that night. The Thursday. The picture was due at the Hessler Saturday morning at ten, framed and dry and ready to hang. The judging was Saturday afternoon, the announcement Saturday night at a little reception with cheese cubes and sparkling cider. I had one more evening of work on it, maybe two, just finishing the gutter line and doing the final coat of varnish. I'd left it Thursday afternoon at three-fifteen, leaning against the china cabinet, with the last coat of gel drying on the snow, and gone to the frame shop. I came home at eight-forty, and the roof was on the floor.
And Krista was on the stairs, and she said what she said.