our dog, Sleep, who was doing just that on the front porch, to the shed. It was July, and the air was loud with crickets and the distant sounds of fireworks. The Fourth of July wasn’t for two more days, but the summer people were impatient.
It was so warm I didn’t need the sweatshirt I had grabbed on my way out. The door to the shed was open and light spilled onto the wet grass. I could see my mother’s shadow moving across the walls inside.
I knocked softly on the open door and peered in at her. She held up one of her stained-glass panes to the bare bulb.
“Look.”
The glass was indigo: not quite black, not blue. But beyond that confused color was the certainty of ruby and emerald and amber. The verity of red and green and yellow, an explosion of color, but still perfectly intact.
Outside, the air cracked and burned with Roman candles. And as I sat on the wobbly stool while my mother worked, I thought about the possibility of explosion. About calmness, and sudden detonation. Watching her hands work across the broken pieces, I felt almost sick with appreciation, but there was no way to tell her how much I needed her.
That night after I crept back into the house, nearly tripping over Sleep’s long body in the kitchen, the sickness stayed with me. It settled in my stomach and shoulders all through the night. If I’d been able to articulate the feeling, I might have realized that I missed her. Already, and she wasn’t even gone.
The next day was brilliant and we walked to the lake to lie in the sun. The grassy place near the boat-access area was littered with empty fireworks shells, burnt at the edges and quiet.
Mum spread a threadbare cotton sheet across the softest patch of grass at the shore, kicked off her flip-flops, and pulled her legs under her, Indian style. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked across the impossible expanse of blue, unbroken by motorboats or sails that day.
A pair of loons had nested at the opposite shore earlier in the summer and we’d watched them after their child was born, teaching the brown downy adolescent how to fish. But today the couple swam and cackled at each other, and the child was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked, concerned that some irate fisherman had felt threatened by the bird’s ability to find fish in the depths of the lake when he, himself, went home empty-handed. It had happened so many times before that now signs all along the lake warned that the loons were a protected species.
“They’ve probably left him alone. That’s how they teach him independence. He’s probably at the other end of the lake.”
“Alone?” I asked, horrified.
“They’ll go get him in a little bit. He’s okay, Piper. He’s just growing up.” She reached into the bag she’d packed and handed me a cold sandwich, wrapped in wax paper. “It’s meatloaf, with mustard.” She smiled. Only she knew that cold meatloaf sandwiches were my favorite. She had probably even saved the last piece, hiding it in the back of the refrigerator, safe from Daddy and Quinn.
I unwrapped the sandwich carefully, like a gift, and ate it slowly, trying not to think about the baby loon alone on the other side of the lake, protected by the law but not by his own parents.
In the summer, we didn’t worry about what would happen when winter descended. In the summer we didn’t worry about money. About food in the cupboards or that my feet were growing so fast I would need new boots again once snow fell. In the summer, it was just me and my mother, searching for broken treasures in the mud.
The clarity of that summer still surprises me. Sunlight struggling through the green of new leaves. The marbled pink of a sunburn, and tumblers filled with lemonade. I suppose the sunshine might have blinded me a little. With the beads of sunlight in my fingers, even now, I skip over the ones made of milky glass, the gray beads that would not let the light come through.
These were the days when Daddy didn’t go to work. The migraine days. The days when he closed his eyes and saw falling stars. On those days, Mum didn’t seem to know what to do. Normally, we would have walked to the lake or through the woods to the Pond, where some of the best glass lay buried in dank mud. But with Daddy home, lying on the couch with a cool cloth pressed against his temples, she stood in doorways, looking lost. On the migraine days, the TV was always on: game shows, soaps, talk shows. She pretended to be absorbed in programs I knew she had never watched before. She jumped every time the phone rang, because once when someone tried to sell her life insurance, Daddy grabbed the phone out of her hand and demanded, Who is this? When Daddy was home, we didn’t go hunting, because every time she walked near the door, Daddy would reach for her, asking, Where are you off to? And then she wouldn’t go anywhere. Not to the lake for picnics. Not even to the shed to work. But then Daddy’s migraine would disappear, as quickly as it came, and he would go back to work. When he was gone, the light returned, and I had my mother back again. I had the green of grass after rain, the soft orange of peaches in a basket, and the violet of the sky outside my night window. If summer here were made of colored glass, this one would be made of emerald, topaz, amethyst. I suppose the sunlight blinded me a little, to the dark days.
On these days, the gray days, I could see the worry in her face and in her hands. I could hear it just under the surface of her voice. At night I listened to their whispers, pretended that their voices belonged to crickets, to bullfrogs, to loons.
“We’re going to Quimby today,” she said one morning in early August.
“Hmmmm.” I nodded. I was busy pushing scrambled eggs across my plate, thinking about how I might ask her for a new pair of jeans for school. I had grown five inches since last summer; I was almost as tall as Daddy, and my clothes didn’t fit anymore. But today was the first day in two weeks that Daddy had gone to work. We didn’t have any money for new jeans.
“Piper?”
I looked up from my plate.
She was standing in front of the sink in her nightgown, and the sun was shining through the sheer fabric. Inside the giant nightie, I could see how small she was. It embarrassed me. I looked back down at my plate.
“I think I’ll bring some of my pictures to the artists’ gallery,” she said softly, like a question.
I looked up again. She was running her fingers across the counter. Nervous.
“You should!”
“You think?” she asked. “Maybe the summer people might buy them?”
I imagined my mother’s glass pictures hanging in strangers’ homes. Filling windows in high-rises, the way they might change the yellow glow of a street lamp into something cool and green.
That afternoon I helped her gather her stained-glass panes and we took them to the artists’ gallery in Quimby. While she met with the owner in the back office, I wandered through a labyrinth of jewelry and sculptures, quilts and paintings. I was amazed by so much beauty in one place and wondered what it would feel like to be able to buy something. To reach into my pocket and pull out enough money for the velvet crazy quilt. How it might look spread across my old bed.
Mum was smiling when she emerged from the back room. The handsome owner of the shop had his hand on her back. When she saw me, she smiled shyly. She blushed when he wrote her a check for the pieces, and she squeezed my hand tightly as we walked back to the car. At the Miss Quimby Diner, she said, “Order anything you want. Anything!” We got hamburgers and French fries smothered in gravy. I’d never tasted anything more
