He straightened up. “You laugh now, but wait until everyone in Iowa is wearing my creations.”
“Creations is a good word for them,” I agreed.
We pulled up to the two-story converted farmhouse my parents had bought when Lacey and I were eleven, tucked in a spread-out section of what qualified as Muscatine’s suburbs. I hadn’t been back since my father’s death, and the loss hit me again as I saw only my mother bang open the screen door to greet us on the porch.
“Honey!” she called out, scurrying down the stairs to fold us both into hugs. “Nicholas! Welcome to Iowa.” She drew back and scrutinized him. “That mustache is very Young Tom Selleck.”
“I’m itching to take it off. Literally,” he said.
Mom grinned and shouldered my weekender as we followed her inside. We had experienced a lifetime of highs and lows since my father died, so it was irrationally surprising to see the house much as I’d left it: the wood-paneled entryway, the Coucherator in front of the TV, the framed Olan Mills photos of me and Lacey lining the staircase. Even the Christmas decorations were all the ones I remembered from my childhood, a collection Mom and Dad had steadily built without ever eliminating any of it; they’d simply shifted all the handcrafted abominations from our elementary school years onto a short fake tree that sat in the dining room, leaving the tall one with the white twinkling lights for the nicer orbs and commemorative ornaments, like the ones I’d sent them from Windsor as a thank-you for helping Nick make Thanksgiving happen, or the year I bought them Henry VIII’s six wives.
“What is this supposed to be?” Nick asked, pointing to a plastic-looking puddle on the kids’ tree that said X on it.
“It was a Shrinky Dink project that they did in kindergarten,” Mom said. “Bex’s melted. Also X was the only letter she liked.”
“It marks the spot,” I defended myself. “There’s always treasure under it.”
I watched Nick delightedly prod at all the cockamamie projects of our youth, then move on to Mom’s shadow box full of thimbles from every place she’d ever visited. He fit here in my past as if he’d always lived in it. But not everything was as easy. Framed photos of our lives had been scooted aside to make room for memories of events where Dad should have been, but wasn’t: Our engagement celebration in my London apartment after I’d pulled the Lyons Emerald out of a Cracker Jack box; our wedding; Lacey’s wedding; Danny’s christening. And it would be endless. There would be no photos of Earl Porter’s beefy hands cradling his grandchildren, sitting them on his belly, or—as I had photos of him doing with us—sneaking them a surreptitious sip of beer and then watching with glee as they screwed up their noses in disgust. Both his presence and his absence felt huge.
“I don’t understand how I can be used to this, and yet it will never feel right,” I said softly. “Wasn’t it just yesterday that he sat me down over there and told me to pull it together and go back to England?”
“I know, honey,” Mom said, putting an arm around my waist. “I know.”
We stood there like that, facing our memories and the empty spot in our future, for a long time.
* * *
“What about this one?” Mom asked me, handing me a dog-eared book whose hardcover spine was peeling away from the binding. “A Bargain for Frances.”
“Of course we need this one!” I yelped. “Wait, wasn’t this Lacey’s?”
“You may be right.” Mom frowned. “I do recall buying this because she’d developed a habit of wanting whatever you’d gotten more than anything she had.”
“This book made me want a china tea set,” I said, riffling through the pages. “I’ll take it. She had her chance.”
Mom grinned. “That’s the spirit.”
She and I were sitting in my old bedroom, rooting through boxes of things she’d pulled out of the attic and from my closet and under my bed—remnants of my childhood that she’d been storing in rooms that still looked remarkably like when we’d last lived in them. When Lacey got pregnant, Mom had summoned her to Iowa to sort through the memories. Now it was my turn. Even though my baby was still theoretical.
“I’m also obviously taking all of the Frog and Toad books,” I said, scooping those over to my side of the floor. “And Sweet Valley High.”
Mom laughed. “Those were used when we bought them,” she said, holding up a tattered copy of the one where Regina Morrow’s heart explodes from snorting cocaine. “Now they’re disintegrating. They’re relics.”
“But I need them!” I clutched the one where Enid gets in a plane crash to my chest. “How else will my kids learn never to date Bruce Patman?”
“Try basic parenting.”
“I’ll be too busy teaching protocol and posture and how to wave.” I looked around my room, and noticed that the knob was still missing from the top drawer of my dresser. “Being here reminds me of how free we really were. How much room I had to be messy and figure my shit out. I don’t know how to raise a monarch.”
“Neither did I, and it turns out I raised one anyway,” Mom said. “Honey, no one really knows what they’re doing when they have a baby. You’ll make mistakes, either with the baby part or the monarch part, or both, but everyone does. I still think about the day your dad and I brought you and Lacey home from the hospital. We were terrified. I put your diapers on backward more than once. Don’t even get me started on how bad he was at cutting your baby nails.”
I glanced at a framed photo of Dad and me in our matching Little League uniforms. We’d been assigned to be the Yankees that year. We’d been so mad about being forced into those uniforms that I think we won the championship halfway out of spite.
Mom glanced down at a box
