always sliding down her nose. I sat her at the kitchen table with her library book and a sketchpad and made her promise, four times, that she would not move from that chair.
Mrs. Whitaker was home that day. She came into the kitchen around ten and looked at Willa sitting
at her table.
Willa looked back at her. She pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Hi,” Willa said. “I like your house. It has a lot of windows.”
“It does,” Mrs. Whitaker agreed.
“How many?”
Mrs. Whitaker thought about it. “I don’t know, actually. I’ve never counted.”
“Can I count them?”
I was halfway up the stairs with a bucket. I stopped. “Willa. We talked about this. You stay in the chair.”
Mrs. Whitaker looked at me. Then at Willa.
“She can count them,” she said. “I’d like to know.”
So my daughter spent that whole snow day walking around Margaret Whitaker’s house with a
sketchpad, counting windows and drawing a floor plan. Room by room. She drew the kitchen with the checkered floor. She drew the living room with the piano. She drew the claw-foot tub.
When she was done, she presented it to Mrs. Whitaker at the kitchen table.
