“How is Willa’s science project?”
“What is Willa reading these days?”
“Did Willa get her braces off?”
And sometimes, not very often, I’d look up from dusting the piano and find her watching me. Not in a checking-up way. In a different way. A way I couldn’t name.
I found out later what it was.
Willa grew up.
That’s the thing nobody warns you about. You’re so busy working and paying bills and making
sure there’s food in the fridge that you blink, and your nine-year-old with the messy braid and the sliding glasses is suddenly seventeen, with contacts and a driver’s permit and very strong opinions about everything.
She still drew houses. All the time. She took every art class her high school offered. She took drafting. She took geometry and got an A. In her junior year, she won a regional contest for high school students, designing a small, affordable house for a single family. Her house had big
windows everywhere. And a little reading nook under the stairs.
“Forty-two windows,” she told me, grinning, when she showed me the plans. “Well, fourteen. It’s a small house. But you get the idea.”
