"He used exactly the right amount of sugar."
"He used enough sugar to stop a heart." Diane laughed and went out to the patio, and through the window Nora watched her mother take one end of the lantern string from Grant, and watched Grant say something that made her laugh again, and watched the two of them walk the string out along the fence, unwinding it between them like a measuring tape.
* * *
There were things Nora knew about her mother, and there were things she knew about her mother's life, and for most of her own life she had not understood that those were two separate lists.
She knew that Diane had been twenty-one when she had Nora, and that she had been a junior at Sac State studying interior design. She knew that Diane had not gone back. She knew that Diane worked at Golden River Credit Union, first as a teller and now, for eleven years, as a branch operations manager, and that she was also a notary public, which meant that half the family's documents—Frank's pension forms, Aunt Teresa's living will, the deed transfer when Leo died—had passed under her mother's stamp and her mother's careful, slanting signature. She knew that her mother liked white wine and disliked red, that she alphabetized her spices, that she cried at weddings but never at funerals.
She knew that her father, Frank, had taught auto shop at Hiram Johnson High for thirty-one years and retired the June before last, and that since then he had been building a wooden boat in the garage, a sixteen-foot skiff from plans he'd found in a library book. She knew he was a quiet man. She knew that when she was a kid he used to wake her up early on Saturdays to make pancakes in the shape of whatever she asked for, and that the pancakes never looked like the thing, and that he would hold up a blob and say with total conviction, "Giraffe," and she would scream with laughter.
The list of things she knew about her mother's life was shorter, and stranger, and she had only started writing it after Leo died.
He'd left the house to Nora. Not to Diane, his only child. To Nora. The will was four lines long and had been drawn up by a lawyer in Elk Grove the year after Leo's wife died, and there had been a terrible week after the funeral when nobody said anything about it at all. Then Diane had called and said in a bright, terrible voice that she thought it was wonderful, that it made sense, that Nora was young and needed a start and she and Frank were settled. And Nora had believed her, because she had wanted to.
Later—much later, at Leo's kitchen table, in the house that was now hers—Nora had found a note in his recipe box, tucked behind the card for his lemonade. Not a dramatic note. A reminder to himself, written in his square carpenter's capitals: TALK TO NORA RE: HOUSE. D WILL SELL. And under it, in smaller letters, as if he'd come back later to add it: SHE NEVER FORGAVE ME FOR THIS PLACE.
Nora had never asked what that meant. She'd put the card back in the box and put the box on the shelf.
* * *
Grant came in at noon to wash his hands, and stood behind her at the sink with his chin on the top of her head the way he did when he was in a good mood. He smelled like sunscreen and cut grass and, faintly, under that, of something sweet and herbal she couldn't place.
"You smell like a spa," she said.
"Your mom's hand stuff. She made me use it. Said I had lantern hands." He held them up, wiggled them. They were good hands. He was a good-looking man, Grant—tall, sandy-haired, with the kind of open, earnest face that made strangers at airports ask him to watch their bags. He was a senior loan officer at Sierra Pacific Bank. People trusted him with the largest numbers of their lives. He was good at it because he believed what he told them, every time.