Her mother let go of her arm. For a moment Simone thought that was a good sign. Then she saw her mother's face, and it was not a face that was letting go of anything. It was disgust. Plain and cold and certain, the way you look at something on the bottom of a shoe.
"My baby," her mother said, "would never lie."
***
There was a list. Simone had never written it down, because writing it down would have made it real in a way she did not want, but she kept it the way she kept the keyboard money, exact and up to date.
The juice on the white rug in the hallway, in August. Grape. Simone had been at Mrs. Delacroix's feeding the cats, and when she came back the rug was rolled up on the back porch and she was not allowed to have anything but water outside the kitchen for a month.
The marker on the wall of the upstairs bathroom, at Micah height, in March. A spiral, blue, permanent. Her mother had said, "You're eleven years old, you should know better than to leave your markers where he can reach them," which was not quite blaming her for drawing it and was somehow worse.
The scratch along the side of the car. The cracked screen on the family tablet. The twenty dollars missing from her mother's purse last spring, which had turned up two weeks later inside one of Micah's sneakers, folded very small, and which nobody had ever mentioned again, including the part where Simone had been grounded for a weekend over it.
The list went back further than that, to things she only half remembered: a lamp, a goldfish, a birthday cake with a finger-swipe through the frosting the morning of her own party. Things that had happened before she knew to keep a list. After a while you stopped arguing about each one. You learned that arguing made it last longer, that if you said "Fine, sorry," and went up to your room, the weather passed faster. Simone had become very good at going up to her room.
But not tonight. Not for this. Not the vase.
Because the vase had been Grandma Hattie's, and Grandma Hattie had been the one person in the whole family who used to look at Simone like she was something worth looking at.
It had stood on top of the upright piano in Grandma Hattie's front room in Macon for as long as anyone could remember, plain and white with a narrow neck and a slight lean to it, like it was listening. Grandma Hattie said her own mother had bought it at a church rummage sale in 1961 for a quarter and that it was the only thing in the house that had survived three moves, two husbands, and one tornado. When Simone was small and they drove down every summer, Grandma Hattie would sit her on the piano bench and play a chord and say, "Now sing me the middle note," and Simone would, and Grandma Hattie would say, "That child has the ear. Lorraine, you hear that? She has the ear." And sometimes there would be zinnias in the vase from the yard, and sometimes nothing, and it didn't matter, because the vase was beautiful empty.
Grandma Hattie had died fourteen months ago, in August, in a hospital bed in a room that smelled like hand sanitizer and canned peaches. Simone's mother had flown down alone for the last week and come back with two suitcases and one cardboard box, and in the box, wrapped in six of Grandma Hattie's dish towels, was the vase. Her mother had set it on the shelf by the window that same night, and then she had stood in front of it for a long time without turning on the light, and Simone had watched from the stairs and not known whether she was allowed to go to her.
She had not gone. She had wanted to. She had been afraid of the answer.
She was my grandmother too, Simone thought now, standing in the wreckage. She was mine too.
She did not say it. It would have come out wrong. Everything she said tonight was going to come out wrong.
***