Over breakfast it settles into a steady drizzle, the kind not likely to let up any time soon. So much for walking in the dunes with Hannah today. After breakfast, she pulls a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle from a shelf, an old one Mom got years ago, when she was the one into gardening. Together, Hannah and I clear the table to make room for it and start sifting through the box for edge pieces. Most of the edge and the hydrangeas in the lower half of the puzzle are together, we’ve eaten lunch and the dishes have been cleared away, and still the rain continues. Mom’s busy with Ivy, Dad heads into the kitchen to try to fix a leaky pipe under the sink, and Hannah and I go back to our puzzle. With her shoulder so close beside mine, it’s easy for me to imagine she feels the same about being close to me as I feel about being close to her. And there’s that ear that I can’t not look at every time she tucks her hair behind it.Into the sound of the wet clattering on the roof comes the tinkly tune from a jack-in-the-box that was Dad’s when he was a kid.
