The following August was hot, the way every August in Sacramento is hot, and on the last Saturday of the month Nora climbed the stepladder under the lemon tree with no one telling her to get down.
The tree had done something strange that spring. On the dead side—the gray side, the side that had never come back after the freeze of 2019—a single green shoot had pushed out of a branch everyone had given up on, low down, near the trunk. Frank had noticed it first, in April, crouched in the grass with Leona on his knee. "Look at that," he'd said. "Look at that, Leelee. Your great-grandpa's tree's got opinions." By August the shoot was two feet long and had leaves on it and, at the very tip, three small hard green fruit no bigger than marbles.
She left those. She picked from the old side, the side that had always been faithful, eight lemons into the canvas bag on her wrist, and came down the ladder in a single easy motion, her center of gravity back where it belonged.
On a blanket in the shade of the patio cover, Leona Rose, ten months old, was attempting to eat one of the wooden boats from her grandfather's mobile, which Frank had taken down and declared a toy now, "because what's the point of a boat nobody uses." She had gotten the one marked NORA most of the way into her mouth. She had four teeth and strong views. She had, as her grandmother had hoped, her mother's stubbornness and her grandfather's hands—square, broad, already grabbing at everything—and she had never in her life been invisible, not for one second, not to anyone who mattered.
"Don't eat your mother," Priya told her from the lawn chair, without looking up from her phone. Priya's wife, Jess, was asleep in the hammock Frank had strung between the patio post and the fence. Marcus Okafor was coming at four with his husband and a lemon tart from a bakery in East Sac that he claimed was the best in the state, a claim Frank intended to test.
In the kitchen, Nora rolled the lemons under her palm, hard, to break the cells inside. Cut them, squeezed them by hand, not with the juicer, because of the pith. One cup of sugar dissolved in one cup of hot water. Six cups of cold. A handful of slices. A sprig of mint from the pot by the back step.
She'd bought a new pitcher in the spring. Not glass. A heavy one, stoneware, cream-colored with a thick handle, made by a potter at the Saturday farmers' market under the freeway who'd told her it would survive being dropped off a roof. Nora had told her she wasn't planning on dropping anything off any roofs. The potter had looked at Leona in the stroller and laughed and said, "Give it a year."
Through the window she could see her father in the back corner of the yard, standing beside the lemon tree with his hands in his pockets, studying the new green shoot the way he studied a piece of wood before he cut it. His boat was finished. It sat on its trailer in his driveway eight blocks away, painted white with a blue stripe, and on its stern, in his careful lettering, he had painted one of the two names that had been blank on the mobile. It said LEONA. He had taken it out on Folsom Lake in June, with Nora and the baby in life vests in the bow, and it had not leaked, which he said was the only review that mattered.
The other blank boat on the mobile was still blank. Nora had not decided what to do with it. Some days she thought she might paint DIANE on it, someday, when Leona was old enough to ask. Some days she thought she might leave it blank forever. She'd found that she didn't have to know yet. She'd found that most of the things she'd once been sure needed deciding right away could, in fact, wait.
She lifted the pitcher. It was heavy—six pounds, maybe, full—and cold enough to fog in the warm kitchen air. She hugged it against her chest with both hands. She opened the kitchen door, the one that led straight out onto the patio, into the middle of everything.
"Lemonade," Priya announced, sitting up. "Finally."
Leona took the boat out of her mouth and shrieked with joy at nothing in particular. Jess woke up in the hammock. Down at the back of the yard, Frank turned around and lifted one hand, and the late sun came through the leaves of the lemon tree, through the old faithful side and the new green shoot on the side everyone had given up on, and lay across the grass in long gold bars.
Nora stepped out into the heat and carried the pitcher across the yard to the table, all the way, and set it down without spilling a drop.