Nora Whitaker came to see her in the spring.
She called first, because Nora is of a generation that calls first, and she asked whether it would be convenient, and I said it would, and she said she would bring nothing this time.
She brought a small bag of lemons from somebody's tree.
"That's not nothing," I said.
"Lemons aren't a cake, Thomas. Don't start."
We went through the house and out into the garden room.
She stopped in the doorway.
I have learned to let people have that moment without narrating it for them, so I said nothing.
She looked at the Reader for a long time.
Not at the room.
At her.
"She's smaller than in the photographs," Nora said at last.
"Everyone says that."
"She's beautiful."
"She is."
Nora set the lemons down on the little table I keep in there, the one that mostly holds watering cans and books I intend to finish.
Then she walked closer.
Slower than she had at my dining-room table the year before, but steady.
She stopped in front of the base.
"May I?" she asked.
"Of course."
She reached out one finger.
Just one.
And she touched the fracture line across the base, lightly, the way you would touch a scar on someone you know well enough to be allowed.
She followed it maybe two inches.
Then she took her hand back.
"Leave that," she said.
"I'm planning to."
"Good. Don't let anyone talk you into polishing it away in ten years when some new person has opinions."
"Grace agrees with you."
"Grace has sense."
She stood there a while longer.
Two women in a glass room, if you count the bronze one, which by then I had started doing automatically.
What struck me was not sadness.
I had expected sadness, from both of us, and had privately prepared for it the way you prepare for weather.
What I felt was something quieter.
Recognition.
Nora and I were not friends before any of this.
We were a name in a file and a man with a garden statue, and then suddenly we were two people who had both been told, by the same polished voice, that the thing in their keeping was probably not worth much.
Two people who had both nearly believed it.
Not because we were stupid.
Because doubt, delivered professionally, in a nice office, with paperwork, does not feel like doubt.
It feels like information.
"They made me feel foolish," Nora said, as if she had heard me thinking. "For asking. That's the part I still can't get over. Not the money. The foolishness. I was a grown woman of seventy-four and I sat in that office apologizing for wondering if my husband's statue mattered."
"I know."
"Do you still feel it? The foolish part?"
I thought about it honestly.
"Less," I said. "It helps that mine is standing in a glass room with a museum label's worth of certainty attached to it. That's not virtue. That's just evidence doing the feeling for me."
"Well," she said. "Evidence is allowed to help."
She said it like a verdict, and it settled something in the room.
We had coffee after that, in the kitchen.
Nora told me about her porch β new boards from the settlement money, a grandson who walks on it barefoot no matter what she says.
Before she left, she asked to go back through the garden room rather than the front hall.
"It isn't shorter," I said.
"I know it isn't shorter."
So we went back through.
She paused by the base again.
This time she didn't touch it.
"Perfect things make me nervous now," she said.
"That sounds like a hard way to live."
"It isn't, really. It's clarifying. A perfect thing is either very well kept or very well faked, and I got tired of not knowing which I was looking at. A thing with a line in it β" she nodded toward the base, "β at least that one has admitted something."
I have thought about that sentence since more than I have thought about most of the legal language in this entire case, and the legal language cost considerably more.
We stood there, the two of us, in front of the proof.
Because that is what she was, by then.
Not just a statue.
Proof that the doubt had been manufactured.
Proof that the files could be reopened.
Proof that a widow in an office and a man in a garden had been right to wonder.
Proof, standing quietly in the sunlight, reading a book with a piece missing, not asking anything of anybody.
Nora reached the door and stopped with her hand on the frame.
"Your mother," she said. "The photograph in the exhibition. The gardening gloves."
"Yes."
"Her hair."
I laughed.
"I know."
"She'd have had words."
"She'd have had several."
"She looked happy, though."
She did.
Hair and all, furious in a museum in advance and happy in a garden in 1984, both at once, which was the most accurate portrait of my mother ever put on public display.
Nora went home with no lemons, because we both forgot them again.
I found them that evening and put them in a bowl.