She noticed it. She let herself notice it, and then she let it go, because she was eight months pregnant and hot and an hour and a half out from a party for twenty-six people, and because there was an explanation for everything if you were tired enough to want one. Her mother was fifty-two. Her mother had a bad knee. Of course he'd held the ladder.
She went back to the lemons.
Leo's way: eight lemons, rolled hard first to break the cells inside. Cut and squeezed by hand, not with the juicer, because the juicer got the pith and the pith made it bitter. One cup of sugar dissolved in one cup of hot water, a simple syrup, cooled. Six cups of cold water. A handful of lemon slices and a sprig of mint from the pot by the back step. He'd made it every summer Saturday of her childhood in a heavy glass pitcher with a pattern of raised diamonds around the base, a pitcher that had been his wife's mother's, and that now sat on Nora's counter, sweating, half full.
Her mother's way used less sugar and a squeeze of lime. Her mother's way was fine. But it was Leo's tree, and Leo's pitcher, and Leo's house, and Nora wanted the first thing her daughter tasted from this yard, someday, to taste the way it had tasted to her.
* * *
She remembered—later, when she was going back over everything with the kind of ruthless attention she'd never paid to anything in her life—a Tuesday in June.
She had been at her OB appointment, alone, because Grant had a closing he couldn't move. Afterward she'd stopped at the Safeway on Freeport for ginger ale and saltines, and in the parking lot she'd seen her mother's car, a silver Camry with a dent in the rear passenger door from a shopping cart in 2017. It was parked at the far end of the lot, by the Starbucks, and her mother wasn't in it. Nora had texted: Are you at the Freeport Safeway?? I'm here!
Three dots, for a long time. Then: No honey, I'm at work. Must be someone else's Camry, there are a million of them lol.
Nora had looked at the dent. She'd looked at the parking sticker for the credit union on the windshield. She'd stood there with a bag of saltines in the heat, and she'd thought, Why would she lie about being at Safeway, and the answer her brain offered was so absurd—an affair? Her mother?—that she'd laughed out loud in the parking lot and gotten back in her car. Her mother was probably getting a coffee on her lunch break and felt guilty about the calories. Her mother was probably buying her a surprise. Her mother was fifty-two years old.
That evening, Grant had come home late from his run. He'd been running Tuesdays and Thursdays since spring, with a group from work, he said, a loop along the river. He'd been sweaty and pleased with himself and had kissed her on the forehead and gone straight to the shower, and she had not asked anything, because what was there to ask?
She remembered a Sunday dinner at her parents' house in Land Park in July, when her mother had made carne asada and put out a bowl of chopped cilantro and said, passing it, "Grant doesn't do cilantro, it tastes like soap to him," before Grant had said a word. And Grant had laughed and said, "Genetic, apparently," and Frank had said, "Huh," and kept eating. And Nora, who had been married to the man for three years, had thought: I didn't know that. How did I not know that? And then she'd thought: he must have said something once. At a barbecue. Mom remembers things.
She remembered her father in the garage that same night, sanding the gunwale of his boat in long, even strokes, and how when she'd come out to say goodbye he hadn't turned around right away. "Your mother seem all right to you lately?" he'd asked the boat.
"She seems happy," Nora said. "The hair, the clothes. Good for her."