And a thirteen-year-old wants her door shut, and her room to herself, and a curtain in her bedroom window, because there is a house across the way and she is thirteen.

She asked me for one in the ordinary way, in the middle of something else, because to her it was a curtain.

I said sure, and we went and got one, and she picked a color I would not have picked, and I put the rod up on a Sunday and she closed it that night.

And I stood in the hallway outside my daughter’s room for about a minute and a half looking at a closed curtain with a light behind it, and I had to have a word with myself.

Because that is where it actually lives now.