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talk…”
    Sometimes when we’re doing errands, a song’ll pop into my head, and I have to write it on my hand to remember to play it for you when we get home—like that song from Rent about all the moments in a year and what we should be doing with them. I can’t tell if you’re responding to the music or to what the music is doing to me, but you always seem hooked. The kicker is when you start singing back—just hearing you say, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” is enough to trigger a little rush of Mother’s High.
    We’ve just begun talking about bigger things. The Beatles came up recently and I showed you a video of John Lennon playing “Imagine.” I tried to explain why anyone would write a song about living in peace and why other people would call that person a dreamer and how sometimes people get shot for no good reason. You said, “How come they let people get guns?” and I said, “Exactly.”
    When Obama won, Dad and I ran home from the neighborhood party and woke you up and took you downstairs to watch the speech at Grant Park, and I had to explain why so many people were crying and shaking their heads and saying they never thought a black man would be president even though you guys kept saying, “He’s brown.” The day after the election, some moms were talking in the school-yard about how California banned gay marriage and you asked me if that meant our friend Joann was divorced now and all the moms jumped in tosay no, and I added, “Someday, that’ll be fixed,” and I was mad at myself for not doing more to stop that from happening. I often feel like I’m not explaining things right to you, probably because half the time I don’t understand them myself. How can I explain why someone would weep because the new president is brown or protest because a woman married the woman she loved?
    Dad and I talk over each other to tell you stories about teamwork or ingenuity or resolve—Venus and Serena Williams playing each other at Wimbledon, the anonymous men who made the Golden Gate Bridge and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Hoover Dam, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. I remember driving home one night under a full moon. You guys were in the way back arguing about which was larger, the sun or the moon, and after that was settled, Dad told you about Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. “They were all the way upthere,” I said, tapping on the car window, hardly able to believe it, as proud as I would’ve been if I’d managed the mission myself. “They walked on that moon right there .”
    Some of your questions have gone unanswered, or rather, too answered. When you asked why we only go to church when we’re with Greenie and Jammy, I must’ve started and stopped six times. As I stammered on about world religion and the gods people worship, Georgia, you wiggled out of bed, strapped on a pair of my high heels, and limped over to see yourself in the full-length mirror. Claire followed you, saying, “My turn, now it’s my turn!”
    That night, I asked Dad if he considered himself a spiritual person and he surprised me by saying yes unequivocally.
    “Really?” I said.
    “You know when I feel spiritual?” he said. Hislips got all puffy, which for him is like falling to his knees and weeping. “When I’m with the girls.”
    We were quiet after that, but I reached over and found his hand under the comforter and squeezed it. So much of our intuition and apprehension and belief about the world turns out to be impossible to communicate, but he had told me something big, something defining.
    You are sacred to me too.
     
    We wanted more kids. Well, I did and Dad was willing. But after my first year of breast cancer treatment, something popped up on my left ovary. It did not wax and wane, as cysts do. It just sat there. Then it started getting bigger, and Dad was adamant that my ovaries come out, regardless of the consequences.
    It was a simple procedure that left me with