Page 81 of None Of Your Business

“I know.”

“So the worry window is pretty small.”

She gives me a faint smile, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

I nod toward the mess covering the bed. “What are we looking at?”

Her hands drop into her lap. “Old photo albums. I found the box in the garage. Your father was going to get rid of it. Can you imagine?”

“Scandalous.”

She pulls a velvet-covered album onto her lap and opens it. “Look. Noah’s christening.”

I lean over her shoulder.

Baby Noah is red-faced and furious in the arms of a much younger version of Dad.

Mom turns the page.

Madison at five, missing both front teeth and glaring at the camera.

Then Piper at two, completely covered in spaghetti sauce.

We wade through a dozen pages like this, and for a while, it’s easy. The two of us lean into each other. She narrates moments I don’t remember, but I pretend I do.

Then she reaches past the albums and into the bottom of the box. She pulls out a small square wrapped in an old, faded pillowcase.

Something in the way she handles it makes me sit straighter.

She unwraps it carefully.

It’s a canvas painted in vivid color. Abstract shapes begin to resolve the longer I look, until I can make out the suggestion of an infant cradled inside curved lines of light.

“Noah’s,” she says softly. Her finger traces the edge of the canvas without quite touching the paint. “I made this the week we brought him home.”

“You painted this?”

“I painted one for each of you after you were born.” She sets it aside and reaches for another wrapped square. “After each of my babies, I felt so full. Like there wasn’t a container big enough to hold the feeling, so it had to go somewhere.”

The second canvas belongs to Madison.

Fierce, layered reds. Burnt orange. Thick, confident strokes crowding almost every inch.

“That looks about right,” I say.

Mom smiles. “She was remarkably bossy for someone who’d been alive for four minutes.”

“Still is.”

Piper’s is next.

Her canvas is softer. Pale yellows and blush pinks, with a faint restlessness at the edges. The brush seems to have moved on before the paint underneath had time to settle.

Madison once told me those years were closer to the edge than any of us realized. The blazing energy behind those colors, the late-night painting sessions, the music turned up loud enough to vibrate the floorboards—all of it carried another name beyond what I’d grown up calling Mom’s creative streak.

I don’t remember it as a crisis. I remember Fleetwood Mac blasting through the house at eleven at night, my mother barefoot and paint-streaked, laughing as she pulled me into a dance in the kitchen while Dad pretended to complain about the noise. I remember being handed a brush I was far too young to handle, told to make a mess, told that messes were allowed here, that this was the one house in the world where nobody would ever scold me for painting outside the lines.

I was six. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.