He pressed the summons into my palm like a store receipt, the morning sky over Westfield, Ohio still pink and empty, my robe still warm from the dryer. “You’ve been served,” he said, and the courier’s shoes clicked down my short concrete path as if he’d just dropped off a pizza and a coupon book. I stood barefoot on the porch, the grit of last night’s dust on my slippers, coffee cooling on the kitchen counter behind me, a garden hose uncoiled like a resting snake where I’d left it after misting the roses. The envelope was heavy. My name—full legal, middle initial sharp as a paper cut—stared back in bold, impersonal type. My son’s lawsuit vibrated inside it like a trapped bee.

I didn’t rip it open. I peeled the flap back carefully, as if gentleness could change the words waiting there: disturbance of privacy, unwelcome interference in household affairs, repeated intrusions, emotional pressure. A request for a court-issued no-contact order. A line about reimbursement for “unapproved financial involvement.” The language was cool and stainless, the kind you read under fluorescent lights. But his signature was there in blue ink, real and human. Thomas Mason. My boy. The one who once wrote me a birthday note in red crayon that said “To the best mom in the world” with the s backwards.

The porch step took my knees the way a church pew does when you have no prayers left—automatically, without grace. Birds kept working the elm as if nothing had happened, throwing little shadows onto my walkway. Somewhere, a neighbor’s garage door rolled up and a Honda backed out, tail lights blinking like sleepy eyes. Franklin County would be heating up by nine. The courthouse, that flat-faced building off High Street with glass that smells like Windex, would buzz like a vending machine. And my son—my only—was taking me there.

Seventy-two years. My life could be filed like a school record: teacher for forty-one, widow for nineteen, mother every day since the first flutter under my ribs surprised me and I thought it was gas because I didn’t know yet what a miracle could feel like. He was Thomas then, a small hitch in my breathing who turned into a long boy with knobby knees and grass stains, then into a man who learned how to iron a shirt and talk like he belonged at tables I’d never been invited to. None of that belonged in a complaint, apparently.

I went inside and set the envelope on the kitchen table like it might detonate. My coffee had a skin—always a bad sign. The hydrangeas bobbed their stupid cheerful heads through the window. My tiny townhouse on Maple Lane was clean and square, the kind of place that keeps your secrets because it’s too tired to judge. It was not the house I raised him in, not the one on Cedar Hill with the draft that taught us to tape towels to the back door in winter. That house had been swallowed, happily, by a young couple with a grill and a golden retriever. I had sold it two years after his father died, when the rooms started echoing back only the things we’d lost. I saved what I could, moved south of downtown and then, when Thomas and Andrea had their second baby, I made the decision that still looked like love in the mirror: I bought a smaller place five minutes from them. I told myself I wanted to bring soup, to fold small socks, to drive Emma to piano and Ben to the playground. In that version of my life, no one filed anything.

I read the complaint again. The paper didn’t change its mind. Repeated intrusions. Disruptive presence. Emotional manipulation. The bold clause, the one that stopped the air in my lungs, came last: We are requesting a court-issued no-contact order and reimbursement of funds related to the defendant’s unapproved financial involvement. Defendant. Funds. Reimbursement. Words that don’t belong in a kitchen where your grandson once mashed a banana with a spoon until he laughed so hard milk came out of his nose. I reached for a dish towel out of habit, then put it down. There was nothing to wipe.

I didn’t call Ruth in Tampa, my sister who would’ve flown up and put her elbows on the situation until it cracked. I didn’t call Alice next door, who still leaves lemons on my back step because her cousin in Phoenix ships them in crates. I didn’t call anyone. Silence has a shape, and it fit the room.

By four in the afternoon I was on my knees in front of the low drawer where I keep important things: a fat rubber band ball, three pens that write only when you bribe them, and the folder I label in my teacher’s hand “Records.” It holds check stubs and photocopies and printouts, proof of how love spent its money. The down payment on Thomas and Andrea’s first house, a neat forty-five thousand from the sale of Cedar Hill. The surprise anniversary trip to Oregon—two coach tickets and a tidy Airbnb by the water—that I booked because Andrea said she’d never seen the Pacific, and I wanted them to look at it and think of something bigger than themselves. The private preschool deposit. The emergency transfer for the furnace that broke in a February that still crackles my bones when I think about it. The grocery runs, the early-morning babysitting, the checks I cut without anyone asking because I could and because that’s what you do when your love has learned how to sign its name.

I lined the pages on the table in a long white ribbon. It made a sound when I slid the stack to straighten it, a sibilant little hiss like a librarian who just caught you whispering too loud. I didn’t plan to bring this to court. I didn’t need a ledger to prove I existed. But it helped to see, with ink and dates, that I had not imagined my place in their life.

It hadn’t started like this. It had started cute. The first time I stepped onto their new porch, an HOA-approved square of concrete bordered by fits-of-green grass, Andrea had placed a gray welcome mat with white block letters that read Please remove shoes and respect our space. I laughed out loud, the way Midwestern women do to soften a thing that feels like it might be sharp. “That’s funny,” I said. “Isn’t it?” she said, and then she pointed at it when I took a step inside still wearing my shoes. Not unkindly. Not warmly, either. Her smile never quite reached her eyes.

She said boundaries like a diet: something new she’d read about that everyone else was supposed to admire. At first she said it with velvet, then she said it with brick. “Grandma needs to respect our boundaries,” she told Emma once when I suggested socks would keep her little ankles warm, and she said it right in front of me while slicing an avocado perfectly in half, her knife sliding through green like it was born for it. Thomas did not correct her. He never corrected her, not even when she started texting me as Edna instead of Mom without explanation, as if a title were clutter she’d decided to declutter.

But there were good days. There were always good days to remember later in case you needed to prove to yourself you hadn’t dreamt them. Emma’s head on my shoulder when “Twinkle, Twinkle” almost made sense under her fingers. Ben falling asleep with his small mouth open, his breath warm on the cotton of my shirt. The morning I found them both in my yard, pant legs wet with dew, picking dandelions and presenting them like bouquets no florist could ever match. If you go to court with only your grief, you’ll drown in it. Bring your good days like a life vest.

Andrea’s lists started six months after I moved into Maple Lane. She came over alone, her car idling at my curb like a bodyguard. She sat on my sofa with her ankles crossed, hands folded in her lap like she’d seen in a counseling video, a printed sheet that said Expectations in a soft-blue font. “We appreciate everything you’ve done,” she began, and we both knew that word appreciate is a door closing softly. “But sometimes your presence can be overwhelming.” I watched her mouth form the syllables. Over-whelm-ing. It sounded like weather. “We’re trying a no-dairy month,” she added, “so that lasagna—while delicious—doesn’t quite fit our plan.” She smiled to show me she wasn’t cruel. She was just correct. “And if you could text before dropping by, that would be helpful. The kids need consistency. We’re building independence.”

I nodded because nodding was the only tool I had that wouldn’t make a scene. When she left, I pressed my face into a dish towel and let it catch the sound. I told myself I would only do what I was asked to do. The problem is, if you love a thing long enough, your hands move before your brain takes attendance. The week after the expectation chat, I brought over a coat. Navy blue, thick, with yellow buttons that made Emma spin like a top in the living room. The next day it was gone. “Not aligned with our style,” Andrea said evenly when I asked. Style. The word slipped between us like a receipt for something more expensive than it should be. Emma said, “But I liked it,” and I said something gentle and cowardly about how sometimes mommies make choices we don’t understand. At home I put my face in the dish towel again and pressed until the cotton smelled like my own breath.

Thanksgiving arrived with a text. “Just the four of us this year,” Thomas wrote. “We need quiet time.” I roasted a chicken in my little oven because a turkey would’ve been a joke for one. I set one place. I poured gravy into a boat like I had a fleet. Christmas came with half an hour of polite visiting and a potted plant signed “with warmth” instead of “with love.” Warmth is what you set your oven to when you want the room to feel like something’s cooking but you’re not hungry.

I tried to make my love smaller, like a sweater you shrink in the dryer and call it a choice. I called before I came. Sometimes I didn’t come. When I did, I left soup on the porch and rang the bell and walked away like a thief. And yet. Andrea stood in the kitchen one Tuesday with the stove still on and said, “You come by too much,” and Thomas looked at his coffee as if it were telling him how to say it. The sentence slid into me and found a shelf and sat there. Too much. Not loved. Not needed. Too much.

When I learned, by accident, about Emma’s first piano recital from a neighbor’s flyer, I sat in the back row of a school auditorium off Maple Avenue and clutched the fold-out program like a passport. My girl walked onto the stage with her white tights wrinkled at the ankles and played “Clair de Lune” as if it were made of glass. People always say children don’t know when you’re there. They’re liars. She searched that room like a sparrow. I left before the applause stopped because shame is louder once the clapping starts. Two days later, Thomas emailed me, formal as a bank: “I heard from a teacher you attended without telling us. It feels like you’re not respecting our space.” He signed it “Best.” I stared at that word until the laptop screen went to sleep.

The summons came next, clinical as lab results. I would be “the defendant.” They would be “the plaintiffs.” We would meet where people go when they decide talking is inefficient.

Before I called a lawyer, I practiced losing. It’s a teacher’s habit. In my head, I lost it all. I lost Emma’s notes, Ben’s sticky hands, the right to leave a pie without permission, the right to clap. When you strip a thing down to bone and it still stands, it’s yours to carry.

When I did dial the number on Miss Harper’s website, her receptionist sounded bored until I said, “My son is suing me.” Paper rustled like a bird. “One moment,” she said, and a slot in Tuesday opened. Miss Harper met me in a conference room that could have been an exam room if you swapped the chairs for latex gloves and a sink. Tall, late forties, hair pinned in a way that said she didn’t have to check it. She shook my hand like she meant it.

“We can respond cleanly,” she said after I explained. “We won’t escalate. We’ll document and we’ll anchor. If they want a no-contact order, they’ll need to meet the legal threshold. They won’t. As for reimbursement, we’ll present your financial contributions as gifts—documented when possible, corroborated by dates and notes—and we’ll remind the court that generosity is not a liability.” She paused. “I do need to warn you: they’ll paint you as invasive. Overbearing. This is as much theater as law.”

“I taught eighth grade,” I said. “Theater is my minor.”

She smiled without showing her teeth. “Then you’ll do fine.”

I didn’t sleep the night before court. I ironed a navy dress because it made me look like I took myself seriously. I found the locket Thomas gave me when I turned sixty—an oval with his school picture tucked inside, two front teeth too big, hair combed like a cartoon of manners—and I fastened it with fingers that remembered better days. I caught the 8:10 bus because parking downtown near the Franklin County Courthouse is a lesson the city teaches you once and charges you for. The driver wore a cap and whistled something that might have been Gershwin. I tried to let the whistle hold me, but my heart had its own song.

The courthouse is not like on television. It’s smaller and more honest. The benches are the color of toast. The metal of the detectors smells faintly like pennies. The elevators hum like a refrigerator that’s seen some things. We sat in a room the size of a school library. The judge, a woman with sharp eyes and a voice that didn’t need to be loud, read our case in a way that made it feel like it belonged to a category she knew too well.

Thomas’s lawyer spoke like an NPR segment. Calm, expensive. He said I’d crossed “clearly articulated family boundaries.” He said my “uninvited presence” caused “stress and destabilization.” The recital. The porch drops. The coat. Everything you do out of love looks different when a stranger lists it with bullet points. Thomas stared at the table as if he were looking through glass at a fish. Andrea sat with her ankles crossed, her face set like a room staged for a real estate photo.

Miss Harper stood and used fewer words. “We don’t contest their right to peace,” she said. “We contest the idea that kindness is harassment.” She laid out our timeline, soft as a hand on a shoulder. She didn’t spin. She placed. “My client gave without expectation. She showed up when asked and, yes, sometimes when not asked. She is not perfect. She is a person. The law is not a shield from discomfort. It is a remedy for harm. Nothing here rises to that.”

Then she asked if I wanted to speak. I didn’t, and then I did.

“Your Honor,” I said to the judge, whose eyes were watching me like a teacher who wants to see if you’ve done the reading. “I don’t deny I have been present. But presence isn’t harm. If showing up with soup is a crime in Ohio, I’ve been delinquent most of my life.” The room made a small sound—someone’s throat, a paper, the air shifting. “My son is raising his family. He gets to. If he wants space, he can have it. But to re-label a mother as a legal threat because she loves is not a boundary. It’s erasure.” I looked at Thomas then, finally, and saw shame flicker like a fish turning toward light. I didn’t smile. I didn’t cry. I sat down.

The judge didn’t decide then. She said she’d review and issue a written order, and that sentence sat in the room like the smell of rain. We left without looking at each other. Miss Harper squeezed my shoulder, and her hand said more than mouths do.

Two days later, the mail carrier dropped a cream envelope with the State of Ohio seal. I opened it on my porch with my slippers on and the world going to lunch around me. Denied. Not an editorial, not a scold, just a sentence that drew a border where one belonged: “Insufficient evidence to conclude that the defendant’s actions meet the legal threshold for harassment, intrusion, or undue emotional harm. The court acknowledges the complexity of family dynamics and encourages both parties to pursue boundaries through personal communication rather than litigation.” No balloons. No victory song. But I set the letter next to my coffee and ate toast as if I were allowed to breathe again.

They didn’t call. Of course they didn’t. It’s easier to pretend the mail never arrived than to walk across a street and say “We were wrong” with your mouth. That afternoon, I baked banana bread because grief does better when the house smells like something you can slice.

Emma’s letter came the next day. Children tell the truth accidentally. Lined notebook paper, torn on the left, green pen, careful spelling. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but Mom was loud. She said you needed to learn a lesson. Dad said you weren’t too much. Then he got quiet. Please don’t be sad. I miss you. I love you. She drew a heart that leaned to the right, like it was walking somewhere. I pressed the paper to my chest and sat in the warm square of sun that lands on my kitchen floor at five p.m. in February like it’s on salary.

I wrote her back on the same kind of paper. I told her love doesn’t disappear because doors do. I told her she could always write me, always. I didn’t say anything unkind about her mother because children are not mailboxes for adult complaints. I walked the letter to the post office and sent it without a return address, as if I could send myself without asking to be sent back.

Emma called me from a number I didn’t recognize a day later. Whisper, careful. “Grandma,” she said. “I used Mom’s phone. Please don’t be mad.” “Never,” I said. She asked if I’d come to her next recital. “I don’t know,” I said, because truth is a gift when a child is old enough to carry it. “That might be hard.” She sniffled. “I want you to.” “Me too,” I said. After the click, I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the kettle boil without moving to turn it off. Grief is louder when you don’t give it something to do.

Ruth called. “They’re underestimating you,” she said. “Good,” I said. “Maybe I’ll surprise all of us.”

Silence settled, then reorganized itself. A week slid by like a drawer that sticks and suddenly doesn’t. I got an email from Andrea with the tone of a memo: We acknowledge the court’s decision. We will not pursue further action at this time. We request that you respect our space going forward. Please do not drop by unannounced or leave items on the porch. If Emma or Ben reach out to you, we will handle it internally. We appreciate your understanding. Internally. When people talk about children like departments, you can hear the training.

I didn’t answer. I watered the basil and pinched its flowers. I cleaned the glass on the framed drawing Emma made of a purple tree with hearts for fruit. I went to the small café off High Street with chalkboard menus and watched a mother cut grilled cheese into triangles and hand them across a table without checking her phone. The world kept behaving as if my heart weren’t under review.

In March, the community center two blocks past the elementary school hung a sign: Volunteer Readers Needed. Tuesday/Thursday, 4–6 p.m. Snacks provided. I signed up with a pen that didn’t want to write and brought a bag of clementines because I knew how sugar behaves in small bodies when you try to read them a story. The first boy who climbed into my lap asked, “Are you anybody’s grandma?” “I used to be,” I said. He nodded, satisfied by an answer that didn’t need editing, and turned the page.

If you think love only counts when it’s noticed, you’ll starve. I let my love count when I measured out the snacks, when I returned library copies on time, when I folded donated sweatshirts and put them into a bin labeled “7–8” with masking tape in my teacher’s neat block letters. Ruth called on Thursdays and we let our silence be comfortable, the way old sweaters feel like a decision you can live with.

Spring remembered itself. The hedges on Maple Lane pushed small, stubborn leaves into the air like proof that the world didn’t need anyone’s permission to come back. I found a note under the cushion of my porch bench the way you find money you didn’t know you saved. Do you still have the necklace with the flower? The magic one? I left it for Emma in a small box with a card: Magic is just love that lasts longer than people expect. I didn’t sign my name. She didn’t need me to.

The letter from Thomas arrived a week later in the afternoon mail, the envelope thick, his handwriting still leaning left as if it were stepping around itself. Mom, it began, a word that stopped me before the sentence could move. I don’t know how to write this. I don’t know how to be direct without making it worse. I saw the necklace you left for Emma. She said it was from someone who believes in quiet things. She misses you. I think I do too. Or I did. Or I’m realizing I never stopped. I’m not asking for anything. I just wanted to say it out loud so it can stop living in my throat. I’m sorry.

The letter didn’t ask me to fix the part of him that had gotten used to the sound of his own silence. It didn’t ask me to prove him right or forgive him for the years between what he knew and what he did. It just put words where a vacuum had been. Sometimes that’s the whole miracle.

I wrote back the next morning with the ease of a hand that has written notes for school lunches and permission slips and thoughts boiled down to something a person can swallow. Thank you for your words. I heard them. I believe you meant them. That’s enough for now. Tell Emma I still believe in magic.

Andrea’s message came after. Not email. A note on good paper, cream with a faint tooth, left like a truce on my porch. Edna, I know we’ve hurt you. I don’t know how to be the person you hoped for. I’m not certain I can be. But I know you love my children and I know they love you. If you’re willing, I’d like to talk. No expectations. No lawyers. Just a start. My first instinct was to refuse. Dignity is a habit, and sometimes it wears the mask of avoidance. Then I remembered the necklace inside Emma’s palm and how she must have shown it to her mother, bright as a coin. I wrote: Thank you for the olive branch. Let’s talk. I suggested the park off Maple, where the benches have peeling green paint and the trees know how to keep their leaves to themselves until they’re ready.

She arrived alone, beige coat, hair in place, hands fidgeting anyway. We sat under a maple that hadn’t yet decided. The playground behind us clanged with small courage. She looked like a woman who’d practiced nothing and didn’t trust that to be enough.

“I was scared,” she said, surprising me with a start, as if we were already in the middle. “Scared of being compared. Scared of not being enough. You knew what to say. You knew how to make them calm. I was always guessing.” She laughed then, a small cracked mirror of a sound. “I thought if I made space, I would fit better.” She looked at the ground. “I was wrong. They just missed you.”

I thought of all the inventories I’d made in my head—her sins, my virtues, our ledger. I watched a boy on the swings pump his legs into the air like he belonged to it. “I’m not here to be better than you,” I said. “I’m here to be their grandmother.” She nodded, relief like a temperature change. “Emma’s recital is next Saturday,” she said. “She asked me to tell you. If you want to come.” Want is such a small word for certain kinds of hunger. “Thank you,” I said, and held the bench with my hands until my palms felt the old splinters.

The school auditorium was still the school auditorium. Folding chairs, paper programs, a banner with two letters peeling. Thomas stood in the aisle with his hands in his pockets like a man who has decided to stop trying to make his body into a posture. Andrea stood beside him, chin high, but her eyes didn’t cut. Emma found me with her whole face, not a secret glance, not a half wave, but an open-palm thing like a lighthouse. She walked onto the little stage in a dress she’d outgrow by July and played with a steadiness that made my throat tight. When she finished, I clapped until my hands were a color, and when she walked down the steps she came straight to me and wrapped herself around my middle like I was a chair she could sit in and rest. Ben stood behind her, half shy, half curious, already longer than he was the last time I measured him in my kitchen.

Thomas waited. “I’m sorry,” he said, not like television, not with music, but with the simple nakedness that makes a sentence hold. I put my hand against his cheek the way you do when a fever breaks. “I know,” I said, because sometimes “I forgive you” is too big and makes the person you’re handing it to drop it. “I know” is a smaller cup that fits in a palm.

We didn’t go back to how we were. That’s a lie people tell to make other people clap. You don’t go back. You take whatever is left and you name it again, and if you are lucky, it lets you. I didn’t leave soup on the porch without texting. I didn’t reorganize cabinets. I learned how to say “Do you need anything?” and let “No, thank you” be a door I didn’t try to unlatch. They learned how to say “Come at five,” and to mean it, and to open the door when the clock said so.

At the community center, Mateo asked if I was still a grandma now. “Yes,” I said, and he nodded as if that had been obvious and we were silly for needing a judge to tell us so. On Maple Lane, I found a mitten on my porch railing that didn’t fit anyone anymore. I left it there all winter the way people leave wreaths until March when they want to remember that something good happened on purpose.

In late spring, the city hung baskets of petunias from light poles along High Street, and the café chalked “lemon bars today” in a hand that looked like happiness. I walked to the Franklin County Library sale and bought a hardback “Anne of Green Gables” with a cracked spine because some girls require familiar magic. I left it on Emma’s bed with a note that said “Read the chapter where she breaks the slate and tell me if it feels like winning.” She texted me a photo of the page with three exclamation points at the part where Anne finds the word she needs.

I wish I could tell you Andrea and I became best friends, that we trade pie recipes and call each other for television tips. We don’t. We are polite and careful and sometimes, when the sun is right, we make each other laugh. That’s enough to carry on the days when kindness feels like a muscle I have to remember to use.

Occasionally, silence visits and tries to move back in. A week will go by without a call, and the old ache will rattle the doorknob. I let it. Then I bake something. I read to kids with their legs swinging. I touch the locket at my throat and tell myself out loud that love is not a contract and dignity is not a performance. I look at the framed drawing of the purple tree with hearts for fruit and I choose, again, to be what a tree is supposed to be: rooted and ready and not in a hurry to be thanked.

Sometimes I pass the courthouse on the bus and see the glass catch Ohio’s white sky. People walk in with envelopes and walk out with opinions they didn’t know they could hold. I don’t bless the building, but I don’t curse it either. It could have made a bad story worse. It didn’t. It handed me back my name without trumpets, and that is as good a mercy as any.

On an ordinary Wednesday, I found a note on my porch in a hand I recognize more easily now than my own, because that’s what happens when you love someone more than once. It said only: Grandma, I learned a new song. It’s not our song. It’s mine. But will you still listen? Underneath, a drawing of a small figure at a piano, hair like string, mouth open mid-concentration.

I put the kettle on. I sliced banana bread I’d frozen for a day when sweetness arrived without warning. I sat on the step with my slippers on and the sun warm as a hand on my shoulder. The house across the way let its screen door thump the way houses do in a part of the country that still believes in screen doors. Somewhere down Maple Lane a dog barked because something was happening and someone needed to be told. I folded the note and put it under the magnet shaped like Ohio, the one with a star over Columbus, because I am a woman who still maps herself to the places that made her. When someone you love asks if you’ll still listen, you don’t say yes with your mouth. You say it by leaving the porch light on. You say it by buying a new program and following the notes even when you don’t know the tune.

I have learned there are three versions of “not leaving.” There’s the loud one where you slam doors and call it devotion. There’s the begging one where you shrink until you’re pocket-sized and call it compromise. And then there’s the quiet kind where you stand up straight, step back when asked, and keep a chair open at your table without a name card. That’s the kind I live in now. It’s less dramatic. It gets fewer likes. But it keeps my hands steady and my heart clean, which is the way my husband used to say it when he fixed things nobody noticed until they broke.

If a stranger had read our docket and asked what story this is, I would not say it’s about a lawsuit. It’s about a receipt—the way a piece of paper can itemize a life and still miss what mattered. It’s about an envelope on a porch at eight in the morning under an Ohio sky and a woman who refused to let her name be reduced to defendant when she knew it also answered to Mom and Grandma and Reader and Volunteer and Tree.

On the days when the past taps my shoulder with a cold finger and asks if I remember how it felt to be erased, I do not argue. I pour tea. I keep my doors unlocked to the hours that belong only to me. I lace my shoes and walk the back path behind the townhouses where weeds perform small acts of defiance and no one writes them up for it. I carry a pen in my pocket because you never know when a note might need writing. And when I pass the house where the welcome mat says “Please remove shoes and respect our space,” I do both without resentment because I finally understand that respecting their space does not require me to abandon mine.

People like to end with advice. I won’t. Advice sounds like a verdict, and I’ve had enough of those dressed in other clothes. I will end with a picture: a second-row seat in a school auditorium, the kind of light that happens only in Midwestern late afternoons when the sun has to work to get through the windows, a girl at a piano finding her way back to herself in a song that is not ours but is played in a room that now includes me. My hands resting quiet in my lap until it’s time to make noise. My throat tight with the good kind. A chair left open at my kitchen table. A loaf cooling on the rack. A locket warm at my throat. A porch light on.

If you were here, I’d slice you a piece and point to the magnet shaped like Ohio and we wouldn’t say the word boundaries because it doesn’t taste good in a mouth. We’d say, “Stay,” and mean it the way you mean it to a dog who already knows you love him. We’d say, “Go on,” and mean it the way you say it to a child who needs to try the hard part alone.

And when the mail carrier’s shoes click up the walk again, as they will, and whatever the envelope holds is once again heavier than paper, I will take it without flinching and set it on the table next to the sugar bowl. I will wash my hands. I will read it. I will breathe. And then I will open the back door to let in a thin line of Maple Lane air, the one that smells like cut grass and chalk dust and something clean starting over.