Nora gave me a calm, gentle smile.
“Mark found me four months ago,” she said. “He brought me a shoebox of your mother’s photographs. He asked if I could put her on a wall so you’d see her every night.”
Tears filled my eyes.
Leo pressed quietly against my leg.
“The stars,” Nora said, crouching to his height.
She took a slender brush from her apron and placed it in his hand.
“Your daddy told this little man that Grandma loved stars. He’s been sneaking upstairs to help me paint them.”
Leo held the brush as though it were something sacred.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell,” he whispered.
“You didn’t tell the important part,” Nora said. “You saved that for tonight.”
My hands continued trembling on the steering wheel during the drive home.
Mark was waiting on the porch, his face pale.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have…”
“Take me upstairs,” I said.
He unlocked the guest room.
My mother looked back at me from the wall.
Her eyes were exactly as I remembered them when she stood at the kitchen window, and above her stretched a ceiling filled with half-finished silver stars.
I lowered myself to the floor and finally cried the way I had refused to cry for three months.
Mark knelt beside me.
“I didn’t know how to reach you,” he said. “You went so quiet.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I went quiet from myself too.”
Leo climbed onto the bed and dipped his brush into a small jar of silver paint.
“Mommy,” he said. “Come finish the last one with me.”
