Sadie worked beside her for a while the way they had the day before, in that near silence that was becoming theirs, and it was Sadie who finally said, "Tell me about my father."
Helena put the knife down. "Come upstairs," she said. "There's something of his I've kept. I've kept it in this shop because the house got too quiet for it, and I've kept it because — " She stopped. "Because some days it was the only proof I had that I hadn't dreamed the whole of it. You. Him. All of us."
The little flat above the shop smelled of tea and old paper. Helena went to the wardrobe in the corner and brought out a cedar box no bigger than a shoebox, its lid darkened where hands had lifted it for years, and she set it on the table between them with the care of a woman setting down something that breathes.
"Thomas's box," she said. "He started it the week you were born. Every man has one foolishness. His was that a box could hold a family together." She turned the small brass key. "Open it. It's yours. It was always yours."
On top lay a child's drawings, the paper gone soft as cloth. A sun with too many rays. A house with smoke standing straight up out of the chimney like a flag. A figure in a dress, a smaller figure holding its hand, both of them smiling with the enormous, lipless smiles of the very young.
"You drew those the winter you were three," Helena said. "He kept the good ones, which means he kept all of them. He said a critic would come along later. He said it would be you."
Beneath the drawings, fair ribbons — blue, red, one white one gone cream with age, their tails stamped with a fair's name and a year. "He won you a ribbon at the ring toss you were too small to reach," Helena said. "He carried you on his shoulders so your hand could be the one to throw. He told everyone at that booth you had the family aim. You were three years old and you had been, to hear him tell it, an athlete since birth."
Sadie laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle, and Helena let it break without rescuing it, which Sadie understood later was its own kind of love — the kind that does not rush to tidy grief.
Under the ribbons lay the bank statements.
Sadie knew bank paper when she saw it; she had sorted Vera's in the spring, rubber-banded by year. These were the same, twenty-five years of them, the early ones printed on the wide green-striped paper banks used to use, the later ones thin and modern, and at the top of the first, in a clerk's hand, the account's name: *For Rosemary Brooks — her future. T. Brooks.*
"He opened it the May after you were born," Helena said. "Fifty dollars. We weren't rich, Sadie. Fifty dollars was a statement of intent." Her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "Every birthday after, he put money in. Every single one. Nineteen ninety-nine. Two thousand. Two thousand and one—" Her voice went. She steadied it with visible effort, the way a person steadies a cup carried too full. "That May came nine days after. After the fair. I told him not to. I said, Thomas, we don't know — I said all the ugly things a person says when they're trying to make the world be smaller so it will fit inside what they can stand. He went to the bank anyway. He said, 'She has a birthday whether we know where she is or not.'"
Sadie turned the pages with a nurse's hands, gentle on paper. The deposits went on. Two thousand and two. Two thousand and five. Two thousand and ten. Years when hope, by any reasonable accounting, should have been dead and buried — and the deposits went on, fifty dollars, then a hundred, then two hundred as the shop prospered, each one dated within a day of the eleventh of April, each one initialled by tellers whose names changed as the years did while the account's name never changed at all.
"I continued it after he died," Helena said quietly. "In sixteen. It seemed — it was the one appointment he never missed. I couldn't be the one to miss it for him."
"How much is in it?" Sadie asked, and then, horrified at herself, "I'm sorry. That isn't — I don't care about—"
"Thirty-one thousand, four hundred and some dollars," Helena said, without a flicker of offense. "And it is yours, and you are allowed to ask, and you are allowed to care or not care in any order you like. He didn't save it to buy you, Rosemary. He saved it because putting money in a bank for your daughter is a thing a father can still do when he cannot do anything else. It was the only fathering left to him. He did it faithfully, every year, in the dark, with nobody watching and no reason left that anyone could name except that he was your father and it was your birthday."
Sadie sat with the statements spread around her hands like a hand of cards she did not know how to play.
"He never stopped," she said.
"No."
"Even when everyone else—"
"Even me," Helena said. "I want you to know that, because you'll think sometime that I was the strong one, and it isn't true, and I'd rather you had the truth of us than a statue of us. I had years I couldn't say your name. He never had one. He talked to you. In the car. Doing the accounts. He'd say, 'Rosie would be in the fourth grade now,' the way another man reads the weather. It wasn't denial. I thought it was, for a while, and I was cruel about it in my heart, and I have been sorry about that every day since he died. It was just — it was how he kept being your father. A man keeps what he can."
From the bottom of the box Sadie lifted the last thing: a photograph in a paper frame, gone wavy with damp at one corner. A big laughing man in a fair crowd, sun in his eyes, and on his shoulders a small girl in a yellow dress with her arms thrown wide and her whole face given over to joy, and behind her left ear, half hidden by a ribbon of dark hair, a crescent of deeper color, clear as a thumbprint.
"That was the April before," Helena said. "Not the day. People always want it to be the day, as if the day would explain something. It's just an ordinary good day that we didn't know was the last of its kind." She looked at the photograph a long moment. "He carried that picture in his wallet until the wallet fell apart. Then he carried it in the next one. I found it in his coat the week after the funeral. In the pocket over his heart, which is a thing people say, except that with him it was simply where the pocket was."
Sadie held the photograph until the light in the little room changed.
"I don't remember him," she said at last. "I want to. I've been sitting here wanting to, and there's nothing — there's carousel music and a voice, and the voice might be anybody's. I remember Vera's voice. I remember her hands. I don't think that's fair to him, and I don't know what to do with it not being fair."
"You don't do anything with it," Helena said. "You let it be unfair. He knew you were three. He used to say, 'If she's out there, she won't remember my face, and that's all right — I'll remember enough for both of us, and when she comes home I'll lend her mine.' " She reached across the table — slowly, asking the way she had learned to ask — and Sadie met her halfway, and their hands closed over the lid of the cedar box together.
"Take it home with you," Helena said. "Read it all. Take a year. Take ten. It's been waiting twenty-five years. It knows how."