I drove down and opened the gate myself.
She was standing beside her car with her arms crossed over her chest in the way she has stood since she was a teenager when she was uncertain but did not want to appear uncertain. She had her mother’s coloring, my mother’s actually, dark hair and the particular quality of stillness in the face that people sometimes mistake for coldness and is really precision.
She looked at me for a moment.
“I didn’t know he was going to say that to you,” she said.
I looked at my daughter. I was sixty-five years old and she was thirty-one and I could still see in her face, in certain lights and at certain angles, the child who used to fall asleep in the vineyard truck on the way back from the far fields, her head against the door, completely trusting the movement.
