He smiled. "All right. I'd like to come."
She took a breath she had not realized she was holding. "Thank you."
A few days later, Victoria visited her mother's grave for the first time in several months without bringing a work phone. The cemetery lay near the older part of the city, under trees that had outgrown the paths planned around them. She carried a small bundle of flowers and her mother's ring in a pouch, leaving it in the pouch rather than placing it on the stone. She had always been afraid that carrying the ring meant she was refusing to let go. Standing there, she began to see that memory and fear were different things.
She sat on a nearby bench and tried to remember the last conversation she had with her mother that was not about illness. The memory came slowly: an afternoon spent driving home from a furniture fair, her mother asking why every chair in the exhibition had looked as though no one was supposed to sit on it. Victoria had defended the designers with the seriousness of someone still convinced that sophistication was a measure of worth. Her mother had replied that a good chair should make a tired person want to rest, and anything else was merely a sculpture with a marketing budget.
Victoria laughed aloud at the memory, startling a bird from a low branch. She wished she could tell her mother about Daniel, about the workshop and Alice and the awkward afternoon beneath the hood of an old truck. She wished she could say that she had learned to sit quietly without feeling she was wasting time. Instead she placed the flowers on the grave and thanked her for things she had not understood when they were given.
Afterward she drove to Daniel's neighborhood and found him on the porch. He took one look at her face and did not ask whether she was all right. He opened the door, warmed tea, and let her sit beside him until she was ready to speak. When she told him where she had been, he reached for her hand and held it without offering an explanation for grief.
"Do you think it's strange," she asked, "that I spent years carrying her ring everywhere but could barely remember the sound of her voice some days?"
"No," Daniel said. "Memories don't obey us just because we want them to. Some days I remember Claire's laugh as clearly as if she's in the next room. Other days I can recall what she said but not the exact sound. It used to frighten me. Now I try to trust that forgetting a detail isn't the same as forgetting a person."
Victoria leaned against the porch railing. "She would have liked you."
"You think so?"
"She would have said you're stubborn and badly in need of new work boots. Then she would have asked you to fix one of her kitchen cabinets."
Daniel laughed. "That sounds fair."