Page 17 of We Are Okay

“I’ll get it. Wait here.”

He came out with fabric folded in his hands, a deep green, and he let it unfurl and I saw it was a dress.

I cocked my head.

“Birdie’s,” he said.

“She sent you her dress?”

“I wanted to have something from her. I told her to surprise me. Does it count as a gift if you ask for it?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

Something struck me about the dress. The straps were scalloped; white and pink embroidery decorated the waist.

“It looks like something a young woman would wear.”

Gramps smiled.

“Such a sharp girl,” he said approvingly. “This dress is from when she was young. She said she didn’t mind sending it, because she isn’t as slight as she used to be. It doesn’t fit her and it’s not appropriate for a lady of her age.”

He took another long look at the dress, and then he folded the sides in and rolled it down from the top so that it never left his hands. He hugged it to his chest.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Later, while he washed the dinner dishes and I dried, I asked, “Gramps, why don’t you ever talk about Birdie with the guys?”

He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t want to rub it in,” he said. “Not everyone can have what Birdie and I have.”

A few days later, I was on the floor in Mabel’s living room, looking through photo albums. “I wasnotthe most beautiful newborn,” Mabel said.

“What are youtalkingabout? You were perfect. A perfect little grasshopper. How about that one!” Ana pointed to a photograph of Mabel wrapped in a white blanket, yawning.

“I want something more... alert.”

All the seniors had been tasked with submitting a baby photo for the yearbook, and the deadline was soon. Eleanor, that year’s editor, grew closer to a nervous breakdown with each day that passed. Her voice over the intercom during the daily announcements had become shrill. “Please,” she’d say. “Please just email me somethingsoon.”

“Have you chosen yours yet?” Ana asked, returning to the sofa to get back to the drawing she was doing.

“We don’t have any.”

She turned to a new page in her sketchbook.

“None?”

“I don’t think so. He’s never shown me anything.”

“May I draw you?”

“Really?”

“Just a ten-minute sketch.”

She patted the sofa cushion next to her and I sat. She studied my face before she touched charcoal to paper. She looked at my eyes, my ears, the slant of my nose, my cheekbones and my neck and the tiny freckles across my cheeks that no one ever noticed. She reached out and untucked my hair from behind one of my ears so that it fell forward.

She began to draw, and I looked at her as if I were drawing her, too. Her eyes and her ears and the slant ofhernose. The flush in her cheeks and her laugh lines. The flecks of lighter brown in the darker brown of her eyes. She’d turn to her page and then look up at some part of me. I found myself waiting, each time she glanced down, for her to look at me again.

“Okay, I found two,” Mabel said. “This one says I’m ten months and I finally look like a human. This one is less baby, more toddler, but it’s pretty cute, if I do say so myself.”