“You make a good momma,” Willow says, and then her eyes drift to the lightning outside, the rumble of thunder that encroaches into the city, like a cancerous growth, and she says, more to herself than to me, “My momma was good.”

“Tell me about your momma,” I breathe.

And she does. Waveringly.

She tells me about her dark hair.

She tells me about her blue eyes.

She tells me her name. Holly.

She tells me that she did hair. In the bathroom. Cuts and perms and updos. She tells me she liked to cook, but she wasn’t too good at it. She’d burn things, or else they’d be undercooked, the inside of her chicken still pink when she bit into it. She liked to listen to music. Country music. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. Patsy Cline.

She isn’t looking at me when she speaks, but rather at the Muppets on the TV screen, Big Bird and Elmo, Cookie Monster. She stares at their bright colors, their eccentricities.

“Where is your mother?” I ask, but she ignores this.

I tell her about my father, and as I do so, a hand instinctively goes to his wedding band dangling from the gold chain around my neck. At the mention of Patsy Cline, her voice returns to me, running like a soundtrack through my mind. Patsy Cline’s death left such an impression on my own mother during her teenage years that songs like “Crazy” and “Walkin’ After Midnight” became part of my childhood, as did the images of my mother and father twirling around the copper brown living room carpeting, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, dancing.

“That ring,” Willow asks, pointing at it. “That’s his?” and I say that yes, it is.

And then for whatever reason I tell her about the wild-goose chase Chris and I went on to find a gold chain that matched. It had to be a perfect match. Close wasn’t good enough for me, wasn’t good enough for my father. Chris special ordered the chain, a purchase that cost him over a thousand dollars.

“We could buy a TV for that kind of money. A new computer,” he said. “Put it toward a vacation.”

But I said no. I had to have the chain.

“This ring,” I had said to Chris that day, standing on Wabash in the midst of Jewelers Row, tears dousing my tired, insomniac eyes, eyes which hadn’t slept since before my father died, “is all that remains of my father. The rest is gone.”

I don’t tell Willow how I fell into a state of deep depression after my father died, a quiet, placid death following an altercation with lung cancer, small cell lung cancer, that is, the kind that had metastasized to the brain, the liver and the bone before he ever knew it was there. I don’t tell her how he refused treatment. He continued to smoke. Marlboro Reds. Half a pack a day. I don’t tell her how my mother buried him with a carton of Marlboro Reds and a neon green lighter, for use in the afterlife.

I do tell Willow about the glorious fall day that we buried my father in the cemetery beside the church, beneath a sugar maple that had turned tangerine overnight. I tell her how the pallbearers carried that casket out of the church, up a spongy hill and to the cemetery. It had rained the night before and the ground was wet. I tell her how my mother and I followed behind. How I held on to my mother so she wouldn’t slip, but more so, because I couldn’t let go, because I was already burying one parent and I couldn’t bear to lose another. I tell her how we watched them lower him in, and then we laid roses on top of the casket. Lavender roses. Because it’s what my mother carried when they were wed.

It’s then that she looks at me with those tired cornflower eyes and says—in that way one says they hate terrorists or Nazis, as if they are truly an abomination to all mankind, and not just how people say they hate the smell of burnt popcorn or hate the sight of overweight women in midriffs—“I hate roses,” and I try hard not to take offense, reminding myself: to each his own, and yet it seems a terribly odd response to my confession.

And then she says, after a period of silence so long that I’m all but certain our revelations are through, “My momma is dead.”

And that word—dead—sneaks out noncommittally, as though she isn’t quite sure whether or not she’s dead, or what that word really means to her. Like someone told her that her mother was dead, like one says A drop in the bucket, or, a piece of cake. An idiom. The kind of word or phrase that makes no logical sense.

My momma is dead.

“How?” I ask, but she won’t say. Instead, she curls into a ball, hiding inside her armadillo shell. Her eyes remain locked on the TV, though they’ve grown glassy and inexpressive, as if she’s made a hard-line decision not to cry. I ask again, “Willow?” but she ignores this completely, as if unaware of my voice, unaware of the way my eyes are cemented to her, cemented to the wayward hair and the lips caked in ChapStick, desperate for an answer to my question.

An answer that doesn’t come.

And then, in time—when she tires of my staring perhaps—she lifts the baby from my arms and leaves the room.

CHRIS

I’m taking the steps, two at a time, down to the “L” platform when the call comes in on my cell. Henry. I stop midstride and retreat to street level, leaning against the fence that encloses the steps leading underground. The street is full of cars and pedestrians heading home from work. It’s not quite dark outside, one of those rare workdays I leave the office on time. A bus is holding up traffic on the street; some suburbanite or out-of-towner tries to bypass it, nearly killing a half-dozen pedestrians at the same time. Brakes squeal. A horn blares. Someone yells, “Asshole!” and shoots the driver the finger.

I shield the setting sun from my eyes with the back of a hand, and say, “I don’t even want to hear it,” into the phone. It’s hard to hear Henry over the commotion of the city, but I make out the sound of his laugh, loud and obnoxious, like nails on a chalkboard.

“Hello to you, too, Wood,” Henry says, and I have visions of him on the commode making this call. His pants are down around his knees. There’s a magazine spread across his lap. Playboy. “Kiss that pretty wife of yours goodbye. We head out in the morning.”

“What now?” I ask and he says, “Road show. Denver by way of New York.”

“Damn,” I say. It’s not that this comes as a complete surprise. We’ve been preparing for this dog and pony show for weeks. But still. Heidi is going to be pissed.

The train ride home is quiet. I depart the “L” at the Fullerton Station and walk down the steps onto the street. There is a homeless man leaning against the cast-iron fence beside the newspaper stands, eyes closed as if he’s fast asleep. Beside him sits a black garbage bag, stuffed full with all of his earthly possessions. He shivers in his sleep in the biting fifty-degree day.

My first thought: those big legs of his, long and gangly, lost in a pair of light blue hospital scrubs, are in my way. Like the other people moving down the street, I step over him with exaggerated strides. But then something makes me stop and turn, to see the redness of his cheeks and ears, the way he’s got one hand on that garbage bag in case someone tries to steal it in his sleep. I pull my wallet from a back pocket and search inside, forcing the sound of Heidi’s voice from my mind. I drop a ten-dollar bill beside the man, hoping the wind doesn’t carry it away before he opens his eyes.

It’d be just my luck if my good deed went unnoticed.

* * *

When I come into the condo, the TV is on. Sesame Street. Heidi’s got that baby laid out on its stomach in front of the TV, and she’s educating Willow about the fine art of tummy time, hoping the big furry monsters distract the baby long enough that she forgets how much she hates being on her stomach, floundering around like a fish out of water.