“You should sleep, Dad,” she would say.
“So should you.”
“I will.”
Neither of us moved.
She became my little helper, but I tried never to let her forget that she was a child. I insisted she go to school dances. I made her accept invitations from friends even when I knew she was worried about leaving me alone with her sisters.
I did not want her to spend her childhood believing she had to replace her mother.
One night, when she was sixteen, she finally asked the question I had been dreading.
“Do you think Mom misses us?”
I put down the dish towel in my hands.
“I think people can miss things and still make terrible choices.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” I admitted. “It isn’t.”
She sat at the kitchen table, twisting a strand of hair around her finger.
“Sometimes I think she doesn’t even remember what we look like.”
