Then she said: “She’s right that it isn’t the thing.”

And I said, “Yeah.”

And she said, “I still think about the curtain though.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

She sees her.

She is not reconciled with her and she has not forgiven her and she is thirteen and those are not thirteen-year-old jobs, and anybody who tells a child otherwise is doing it for the adults.

What she has is a mother she sees once a month who she is allowed to stop seeing, and that is not a happy ending and it is the correct one, and it will be whatever it is going to be when she is twenty-five.

Part Eighteen: The Window