Bringing her home took longer than the exhibition did.
The museum was sorry to see her go, in the careful way institutions are sorry, and there were forms, and a courier, and a crate that cost more than my first car.
Then she was in my garage.
Not the garden.
The garage, in her crate, under a work light, while I stood there feeling ridiculous about my own hesitation.
She weighs more than you'd think.
Bronze usually does.
The insurance people had made their recommendation months earlier, and they made it again in writing when she came back, in case I had failed to understand it the first time.
Indoors.
Secure display.
Climate control.
Every word of it sensible.
Every word of it the sort of advice you cannot argue with and cannot quite live inside.
My sister Claire read the letter over my shoulder.
"They have a point," she said.
"I know they have a point. They have several points. They have a whole document of points."
"So put her in the house."
"Where? The dining room? Next to Dad's shelf brackets?"
"People do have art in dining rooms, Thomas."
"People also have opinions about other people's statues, Claire."
She let that go, which for my sister counts as a diplomatic achievement.
That night I did what I had been doing all year whenever a decision got too large.
I went out to the garden and sat on the bench.
The fountain was running.
The ivy had come back over the low wall, because ivy has never once in its life taken a hint.
The space where she had stood for fifty years was just a space now, and it looked smaller than I remembered, and sadder.
My mother had a rule about that statue that she never wrote down and never needed to.
The girl belongs in the garden.
She said it about the weather.
She said it about a neighbor, years ago, who suggested the piece might be worth something and ought to be kept inside.
She said it once about me, when I was twelve and had left a bicycle lying across the garden path in the rain.
Actually she said several things that day.
But the statue part was: the girl belongs in the garden.
She would have laughed at the insurance letter.
Not because she was careless.
Because she understood things have a place, and moving them out of it to keep them safe can be its own kind of loss.
So I compromised.
Compromise is supposed to be a failure of nerve, according to some people.
In my experience it is usually what love looks like when it has a budget.
We built a small glass garden room off the back of the house.
Not a museum.
Not a vault, either.
A room with glass where walls would normally be, attached to the rear of the house, overlooking the same fountain she had faced since before I could read.
The roof keeps the rain off her.
The climate stays steadier than it ever did outside.
But the sun still comes through in the morning and finds her the way it always has, through the maple, in pieces.
We set her facing the maple.
Facing the bench.
Facing the ivy coming over the low wall she used to sit on, which feels like a small joke the garden is playing and which I have decided to allow.
The movers set the base down and stepped back.
"There?" one of them asked.
"There," I said.
Then they left, and it was just the two of us.
I stood in the new room with its smell of sealant and fresh wood and looked at a bronze girl reading a book with part of one page missing.
"Fifty years outside," I said, out loud, like a man who talks to statues, which apparently I now am. "You can manage a roof."
The fracture across the base caught the light.
Grace had been right not to hide it.
It was part of the object now.
Not my favorite part.
But part of it.
Claire came by that weekend with a plant I did not ask for and stood in the doorway of the garden room for a while.
"She looks right," she said.
"She looks indoors."
"No," Claire said. "Look at her. She's facing the garden. She's basically outside with better management."
"Better management."
"Mom would have approved of better management. Mom was extremely pro-management. She managed us."
That was true enough that I laughed.
Later, after Claire left, it rained.
A real Savannah rain, the kind that arrives all at once and turns the garden into something briefly tropical and entirely unbothered.
I sat inside the glass room with a cup of coffee and watched the water run down the outside of the glass.
The fountain disappeared into the rain.
The bench disappeared.
The maple was just a dark shape being generous about it.
And she sat there dry, in the light that was left, reading.
Not protected from the world.
Just sheltered from the worst of its weather.
There is a difference, and at fifty-two I had finally learned it.
She was home.
Not where she had always been.
Home anyway.