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and her best friend, Greta, spent hours writing dramatic stories about her dead mother. They knew that Serena, beautiful and angelic, would have been nothing like the real, down-to-earth, practical mothers around them—the Barbs and the Patties and the Carols, energetic mothers who insisted on homework getting done and bedtime being eight thirty. No, she would have been above all that, sharing her makeup and jewelry, letting them stay up late and dress in fancy chiffon gowns.
    They sobbed as they created and acted out the imaginary scenes of Serena’s life. On most days, they took out the Serena Box, the secret collection of things that Rosie felt that her mother had once touched. There was a painted china cup that Soapie once said was the last cup her mother had drunk from before she left home that morning to go into the city; a turquoise silk scarf; and a fuzzy photograph of Serena as a child with the sun behind her head shining so brightly that it looked as though her hair might be on fire. Rosie also has a hair clasp with some possible Serena hairs still in it, and the most valuable thing of all, an old cassette tape with Serena’s voice on it, singing in a raspy, laughing voice, “Pieceof My Heart,” a song that years later stopped her in her tracks when she heard Janis Joplin do an almost identical version.
    On bad nights, when she was alone, Rosie would lock her bedroom door and take these things out, fingering each one of them and calling out for her mother, who never once showed up.
    By the time Rosie was in high school, she had lost interest in telling the story or capitalizing on the panache it afforded her. She had gone through all the stages of thinking about Serena. She had idealized her, worshipped her, pitied her, been furious with her, hated her, and forgiven her over and over again, and she had had enough. She put the Serena Box away and didn’t take it out for years.
    By the time she met Jonathan, she didn’t think about her mother at all. She was okay, going unmothered. He was teaching a pottery class she signed up for, and just about everybody in the class developed crushes on him, mesmerized by his wide grin and the joy that seemed to burst out of him when he was handling the clay. She recognized his type: a shy man who became a wizard when he was doing what he loved, a god who could take wet mud spinning around and guide it into becoming bowls and pots and sculptures.
    She fell for those large hands, his curly hair, the way his eyes would squint when he’d throw back his head and laugh—and most importantly, the fact that, out of everybody in the class, he seemed to choose her. What was it that he saw there in her clumsiness? He put his wet, muddy hands over hers and moved her toward her own creativity.
    And then one evening—soon after they’d started going out, when it was already clear they were going to be lovers for a while—they were lying in bed together at her apartment. Itwas dusk and they had finished making love, and were saying those things you murmur, like
oh this was the best, the very best, you are amazing
. And then she heard herself say, “My mother died when I was three.”
    She hadn’t told the story for many years, but it was all there, waiting to be brought out and unpacked again: the crumbling building, and the friend her mother had been meeting for a Coke, the grandmother who became the Dustcloth Diva. She told him that things had basically worked out okay, probably the way they were meant to. She realized as she was saying it that somehow she really had survived it, all of it: her mother, her father, her grandmother, all her early romances, and the confusion that comes from feeling you belong nowhere.
    He didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time, but his eyes looked full of knowing, like he could see both the pain of it and the freedom of it and not judge either one. His fingertips started making soft little circles along her jaw, and then he kissed the