"I figured."
"I brought you the copy. The journal page." She held out the envelope. "And something else. I've—I need you to read it. You can do whatever you want with it. Give it to your lawyer. I know you have a lawyer. Priya. Of course Priya. She always hated me."
"She never hated you, Mom."
"She looked at me," Diane said, "the way you're looking at me now."
Nora took the envelope. She didn't open it. They stood there, the two of them, on either side of the threshold, and behind her mother the street was bright and empty and someone's sprinkler was ticking across a lawn.
"Come in," Nora said. "Sit down. I'm not supposed to stand."
Her mother came in and sat in Leo's recliner, at the very front edge of it, the way people sit in waiting rooms. Nora sat on the couch across from her. Between them was the coffee table, and on it the wooden mobile, which Nora had been meaning to hang in the nursery and hadn't, because she kept wanting to look at it.
Diane looked at the boats. Her eyes went to the names on the sterns, LEO, ROSA, NORA, and stayed there.
"He made that," she said. "Frank."
"Yes."
"He never made me anything." She said it without bitterness, almost curiously, as if noticing a fact about the weather. "Thirty-two years. That's not fair. He fixed things. He fixed everything. The car, the disposal, the gate. He just never made anything that was for me." She looked up. "I'm not saying that's a reason. I'm not saying there's a reason. I want to be clear. I didn't come to give you reasons."
"Then why did you come?"
Diane was quiet for a long time.