"She was trying to show me something," Emma said. "There was a yellow airplane, and I couldn't see through the window. I knew she was inside, but I couldn't open the door."
Caleb put the spoon down and went to her. Four years had passed since Grace Richardson died after a sudden illness that had taken her from healthy to hospitalized in less than a month. Emma had been three, old enough to remember the sound of her mother's laugh, but too young to keep many details straight. Her memories came in fragments: a blue sweater, a song in the car, the smell of oranges when Grace peeled them at the kitchen table. Caleb had learned not to correct those fragments when they changed. He wanted his daughter to know she could remember her mother without being tested on accuracy.
"Maybe she was showing you an airplane because you like them," he said. "Or maybe because she wanted you to know she was thinking of us. I don't know, sweetheart. Dreams don't always explain themselves."
Emma leaned against him. "Do you think she remembers me?"
The question found a place inside him that had never really healed. He crouched until they were eye to eye and moved a curl away from her forehead. "Your mama loved you every day she had," he said. "Nothing that happened afterward changes that."
Emma considered this, then nodded. Children could hold enormous sadness for a moment and return without apology to hunger or homework. "Did you burn the eggs?"
"Not yet, but you're giving me less time than I'd like."
She climbed onto the stool and watched him cook. Halfway through breakfast, she asked whether he was a professional. A boy in her class named Marcus had told everybody that his father worked in an office with a chair that spun all the way around. Emma understood a professional to be someone who possessed a spinning chair, wore clean clothes during working hours, and was allowed to answer the telephone without anybody telling him to stop.
"I've got a wheelie stool," Caleb said. "I can turn in a circle without even touching the floor."
"That's not the same," Emma informed him. "Marcus says professionals have a desk."
Caleb smiled, though the question stayed with him. "I fix things people need fixed. That's a job. A real one."
"Then why do you always worry when the phone rings?"
It was the sort of question children asked because they could see what adults imagined they were hiding. Caleb looked at his plate. He worried because a ringing phone might be a client who would pay the overdue electric bill, or a landlord demanding money he had not yet earned, or a teacher telling him Emma needed something his budget had not anticipated. The difference between good news and bad news was often determined entirely by the person on the other end.
"Because sometimes I care about fixing a thing before I even know what it is," he said. "That's all."
Emma accepted the answer and held up her fork. "Then you're a professional worrier."