If she could take it, after all the leg lifting with weights and the therapist rotating her ankles, she took ballet afterward. Sometimes Caro went with her. About half the time, she made it, and the rest of the day the rest of us all lived as if we were holding our breaths. She kept getting better, though, not worse. My father was coming back—without Amos—for the divorce. I kept hoping to start feeling weird and sad and drained and sort of nostalgic about Leo and my childhood and junk. But all I felt was dead to the touch, like the crooked scar on my knee from when I cut it down to the bone on a broken bike handle. The feeling never came back. It still hasn’t. The divorce just seemed like a normal fact now. Not even like something you’d change from tennis shoes to loafers for. And this was a thing that I would have thought as unlikely as a Martian installation in Klaus’s greenhouse, only a year before. The past six months had been the longest five years of my life. Now, the only thing I wanted was for my mother to look good in court.
