Nobody had taught her that. Not Mama. Not Nora. Not Auntie. Just a word she had invented herself, out of whatever pieces of the world she had collected, for the person who had been there when she woke and there when she slept. Nora sat down on the kitchen floor next to her in the measuring cups and held her, and the baby squirmed and protested and tugged her hair, and Nora thought, oh, I am in so much trouble.
She told Tessa about it on the phone that Sunday. There was a long silence on the other end.
"That's good," her sister said finally. "That's really good, Nor. I'm glad she has a word for you."
"Tess—"
"No. I mean it. I'm glad." Another silence. "I'm doing the work here. The real work. They're talking about letting me do a step-down program in the fall, living in a sober house in Rochester and working part time. My doctor thinks maybe by next year I could—" She stopped. "I don't want to say it. I don't want to jinx it."
"You don't have to say it."
"I want her to have a word for me too, someday," Tessa said. "Is that terrible? To want that?"
"No," Nora said. "It's not terrible at all."
* * *
Brooke Sundquist appeared in late July.
She was a dental hygienist from Hudson, Wisconsin, who had moved up to Duluth for a job at a practice in Canal Park, and she had met Daniel at a fundraiser for the Lake Superior Zoo, and she was, Nora had to admit, lovely. She was twenty-nine, with long blond hair she wore in a complicated braid and a laugh like a wind chime. She brought Linnea a stuffed loon the first time she came over. She was kind to Nora in a bright, slightly too careful way, the way people are kind to a coworker who has recently been demoted.
At first she came for dinner. Then she came for weekends. By October, her toothbrush was in the upstairs bathroom and her yoga mat was in the living room and her car was in the driveway most mornings when Nora came down to make the first bottle.
Nora did not say anything. It was not her house. Her sister had been gone almost a year, and the marriage, as far as Nora could tell, had ended somewhere in the hospital parking lot without anybody saying so out loud. Daniel was allowed to be lonely. Daniel was allowed to fall in love.
What bothered her was something smaller and harder to name. It was the way Daniel talked when Brooke was around. He talked about the business as if it were thriving. He talked about a big contract with the city, which Nora was fairly sure did not exist. He talked about a trip to Cancun in the winter, about maybe looking at a bigger place out on the North Shore, something for a family. Brooke listened with shining eyes. And once, when Brooke was in the kitchen and Nora was clearing plates, Nora heard him say, lightly,