The memory is vivid: my mother stands in the kitchen as my sister and I make paper boats out of newspapers. We want to play with them in the suds from dad washing his car, but mother won’t let us; we don’t know that then, though. We’re playing laughing, creating, messing up and still laughing, as if nothing really mattered besides having fun. The scent of lemons fills the memory: my mother with her lemon perfume and kitchen soap. My sister creates some story about the paper boats and how they are going into a fantastical village to rescue some maiden who is lost in a lemon grove, and I wonder where she got that story. I asked her about it when we were adults but she didn’t remember.

I didn’t remember one piece of this memory until recently, either: the tears of my mother, facing away from us, crying into the kitchen sink. I thought the drip was the sound of the faucet running, not quite turned off. I didn’t realize until later that my dad wasn’t home, wasn’t washing his car, and hadn’t been around for quite some time.

I know I’ll, we’ll, never seen him again, but none of us know that then, in that memory.