“Can I ask you about Alice?”
“My mother?” She reached for two mugs. “You’ve been asking about her since you were little.”
“I know. I’m asking again.”
Grandma gave me a curious look. “All right. What do you want to know?”
“What was she like?”
“Did she ever tell you why she traveled?”
“Peculiar,” she said, pouring the water. “She could be kind, but she was private. If you asked where she’d been, she’d tell you there was nothing to see.”
I waited.
Grandma smiled a little. “Then she’d say, ‘No place is like home.’ I must have heard that a hundred times.”
“Did she ever tell you why she traveled?”
“I never had a reason to question that.”
“No. I’d ask, and she’d change the subject.” Grandma carried the mugs to the table. “She had photographs from all sorts of places, but she never wanted to talk about them.”
“What about your father? Did she talk about him?”
“Of course. He was a good man. He raised me, and he loved me. I never had a reason to question that.”
She said it with such certainty that I didn’t know what to ask next.
Inside were the things I remembered.
I took my tea and went upstairs while she carried the twins out into the garden.
The old chest was still in the attic. I found it beneath a sloping window, covered in dust.
“Still here,” I whispered.
Inside were the things I remembered: postcards, loose papers, and photographs Grandma had never sorted. I lifted a few, then stopped when I found an old photograph and a letter beneath them.
“Did you find Alice’s things?”
I looked at what I’d found.
Now everything made sense to me.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Are you up there?” Grandma called.
“Yes.”
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