On the other side of the door, Lucy said it for her. "Your mom."
Paige pressed her forehead against her knees.
"I put on her coat," she said into her jeans. "I put on her coat and I said—God. I said it looked better on me. I said that. To you. About your dead mom's coat."
"Our," Lucy said.
"What?"
"Our dead mom." There was a long, shaky breath on the other side of the door. "I'm still figuring out how to say it. Sorry."
Paige lifted her head and looked at the door. On the other side of it was a girl she had shared a bathroom with for eleven months and never once really looked at. She tried to picture Lucy's face, and she realized she couldn't quite do it. She knew Lucy had light brown hair. She knew Lucy wore that speckled oatmeal sweater about four times a week. She did not know what color Lucy's eyes were.
"What was she like?" Paige said.
It came out before she could stop it. And she wanted to take it back immediately, because it felt like a betrayal, of her mother downstairs, of the whole seventeen years, of every lunch packed and every ear infection sat through. But it was out. It was in the hall now. She couldn't get it back.
On the other side of the door, Lucy was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Paige thought maybe she'd gotten up and left.
"She sang in the car," Lucy said finally. "Really badly. Like, the worst. She'd change the words to be about whatever we were doing. Like, I'm going to Kwik Trip, I'm going to Kwik Trip, I'm going to buy a hot dog that's been there since Tuesday." Lucy's voice wobbled and steadied. "She worked at a garden nursery. She had dirt under her nails all the time, even in winter. She grew lemons. In a little greenhouse she built out of old windows behind the house. Real lemons. In Wisconsin. They were tiny and really sour and she was so proud of them she'd bring them to work and make everybody try one."
Paige closed her eyes.
"She was sad sometimes," Lucy said. "I didn't understand why. There were days, like, every December, where she'd just—she'd go quiet. She'd go out to the greenhouse and sit there. I thought it was just winter. I thought she just hated winter." A pause. "December ninth. That's your birthday, right? Grandma said."
"Yeah."
"Every year on December ninth she made a cake," Lucy said. "And she never told me what it was for. I'd ask, and she'd say, it's for somebody I love. And we'd eat it, the two of us, and she'd put one candle on it and she wouldn't let me blow it out. She'd let it burn all the way down."