But Cleo didn’t want that sort of help.

She’d been on her own, emotionally if not practically, since her senior year in high school, and frankly, she’d learned to navigate it. It didn’t mean that she didn’t need help. She knew, empirically, that she did. But she’d figured out enough shortcuts to get along by herself that she simply couldn’t bring herself to tolerate Georgie’s kindnesses. Even when she had to take Lucas out in the snow wearing shorts and endure the withering glares from other self-righteous mothers, she knew she would have found these kindnesses oppressive. Not because kindness wasn’t wonderful, but rather because Cleo would have, like so many other times, taken them as a signal that she was less than. That she was a less good mother than Georgie. All these years later, Cleo considered this excuse and how stupid it sounded. No one knew how to be a great mother in all ways on instinct. Why had she assumed otherwise?

In the car, Lucas’s stink had muted a bit. Maybe Cleo just adjusted to the smell. She wasn’t sure.

“I really don’t feel well,” he said again. “Can we please just go home?”

Cleo had pinned her night on their dinner. She wanted to talk to him about juggling two girls: Marley and Esme. She wanted to talk to him about his life. And, she supposed, she needed to talk to him about hers. About Nobells, about the shitty decisions she made in law school, about everything that was blowing up.

She reached over from the driver’s side, felt his forehead. She had never been good at assessing temperatures. Once, when he was in second grade and she was a freshman senator, he was whining at breakfast; she couldn’t find the ear thermometer, and she was late for a meeting with, ironically, Senator Parsons (prick!), so she palmed his forehead and scoffed and stuffed him into the car and sent him to school. Ninety minutes later, the nurse called and said he had a 102 fever and couldn’t she come right now to pick him up? Cleo remembered, even now, the criticism in the nurse’s voice. Of course no one knew how to be a perfect mother on instinct!

“You do feel a little warm,” Cleo said. She had no idea if he was warm or not, but his cheeks were drained of color, and she supposed that they could go to PATTIES another time. Lucas groaned and sank lower in the car seat. Cleo didn’t want to give him an out, another missed day of school just because—and she wondered if this weren’t part of a longer con that would stretch into the morning—but she didn’t want to be negligent either.

She made a U-turn and headed toward home.

Lucas immediately got into bed, mumbling that he was going to sleep for the night, and then slammed his door. Cleo poured him some orange juice and brought him two Tylenol and hoped that he could shake this or admit he was being melodramatic, because she was supposed to go on Bowen’s show tomorrow, and Gaby was going to hit the roof if she bailed. He pulled his duvet up to his neck and moaned, and then he told her to get out, so she did.

She wound her way back into the kitchen and made herself a PB and J, then padded to her office. The free evening meant that theoretically she had time to review all the files she’d brought home, and yet after she eased into her chair and sat in silence without her phone or computer and devoured half the sandwich, she unlocked her top drawer and reached for her list.

She flipped the pages and found herself suddenly and unexpectedly missing her mom, who had always been excellent at assessing a fever just by the touch of her hand. Cleo guessed that Georgie was the same: even in her chaotic teen years, she was always more of their mom while Cleo was always more of their dad. And though their parents were a perfect pairing, she and Georgie just so rarely found common ground, as if a romantic partnership worked when it came to opposites but the same was not true of siblings or even friendship. Cleo ran her fingers down her list, searching for the entry. She’d told Gaby she’d consider some sort of public dancing (eek) and she would, but she needed to see it there again, concretely, on the page, as if not just to commit to the follow-through but also as a reminder of her lament in the first place. How much more of her mother she could have been. How much she regretted that she wasn’t. Cleo thought back to her trip to Seattle not even two weeks prior, down by the waterfront, of those times her mom dragged her out to watch her paint and how antsy Cleo had been. How she considered it time wasted, how she thought it was wholly unproductive, just staring at the land and the lights across the water and committing it to canvas.

She returned to the second page, which had been penned during college. Nearly the entirety of the entries were devoted more to achievement—an American history exam she appeared to have gotten an 84 percent on—or pursuit of a future achievement—not making enough friends on the student government to be nominated for class president—than anything personal. Obviously, her senior year at Northwestern, there was an extremely personal, terribly intimate entry—two, actually.

She flipped forward and back and then forward again, and there it was: I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing.

She stood suddenly. At seventeen, Cleo had happily given the bulk of her mother’s paintings to Georgie; she didn’t have the wall space nor the decorator’s vision for them. They weren’t what she anticipated hanging on her dorm room walls (she didn’t end up hanging much), and now Cleo could see that they were reminders of her loss and, even back then, she preferred to look only forward. But when her grandmother died, Cleo took three paintings from her home, and over the years they’d traveled from house to house with her, never once leaving their Bubble Wrap. That was enough for Cleo until tonight—knowing they were in a closet somewhere, a hidden reminder of her mother and her gifts and that maybe somewhere, deep inside Cleo, she had a tiny, microscopic bit of an artist in her too.

Not an artist artist, Cleo thought as she rounded the corner in her hall, on the way to the storage space in her foyer. Just . . . that there was room inside her for something beyond the rigid and the logical and the straight and narrow. Her mom’s paintings were always a little off, a small bit askew. Her dad used to rib her about it, the slightly awry perspectives. But her mom would just laugh because of course this was intentional; she was seeing things differently than everyone else, and she wasn’t about to apologize for that.

She had to move all of Lucas’s soccer gear and a bunch of snow stuff that he’d outgrown, but she found the paintings in the back of the darkened space. She tore the tape away, then the padding, and she lost her breath a little bit once she had. Her mother’s artworks weren’t glorious masterpieces. Cleo didn’t need to study art history to know that. But they were masterpieces to her mom—and to her father too—and Cleo sank to the dirty floor of her storage space and considered that this had been enough for both of them. To make a little art, to paint a landscape that only your brain and imagination could, and to share it with someone you loved.

EIGHTEEN

Lucas was still sick the next morning.

Cleo had hammered a hook into the wall to hang her favorite of her mother’s paintings, and he hadn’t even woken. Finally, ten minutes before they needed to leave for school (and work), she shook him awake and felt his forehead, which seemed clammy but she didn’t think feverish. (But who really knew?) Overnight, forty-six more #pullingaCleo videos emerged, which meant thousands upon thousands of retweets and comments, which also meant that Gaby had texted her six times before she even showered, to ensure that she unequivocally absolutely would not back out of Bowen’s show.

Cleo very much wished her home were better organized so she could find the thermometer and gauge whether or not she should force Lucas to school or if this was food poisoning or if this was just him wanting to skip. He’d been known to be an extremely excellent faker too.

“Lucas, please, buddy. You already missed school for our Seattle trip.”

Lucas grunted again, then rolled away from her and pulled the pillow over his head.

“OK,” Cleo conceded. “It will be a mental health day. Your last one. I’ll call you around lunch to check in.”

She retrieved the bottle of Tylenol and left another glass of orange juice on his nightstand.

Lucas was back asleep before she was out the door.

Cleo was due on Bowen’s set in the early afternoon, which gave her the morning to get her ordinary business out of the way.

“First of all,” she said to Gaby as they waited for their coffee order near her office, “Parsons booted me from the trip this weekend.”