She had packed the flowers herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was the part nobody understood \u2014 not her grandmother, who had watched with folded arms and said nothing, and not the neighbors who had come to help load the truck and exchanged looks over her head the way adults exchange looks when a child does something they find impractical but don’t have the heart to address directly. The flowers had gone into the basket first, wrapped in the damp cloth her grandmother used for bread, tucked carefully among the stems so none of them would bend. Then the basket had gone on her back, and the suitcase \u2014 the dark brown one with the brass clasps that had belonged to her mother \u2014 had gone in her hand, and Lily Brennan, six years old, had walked out the front door of the only house she had ever known without looking back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was very good at not looking back. She had been practicing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The puppy had been waiting at the gate. He was four months old, cream-colored, with ears too large for his head and paws too large for his body and the permanent expression of a creature who has decided that whatever is happening is probably fine. He had no name yet \u2014 he had belonged to the farm, technically, and naming him had felt like making a promise she wasn’t sure she was allowed to make. But he had followed her down the lane and then along the coast road and then to this place \u2014 this gray beach between the rocks where the sea came in cold and the snow still sat in the crevices where the sun hadn’t reached \u2014 and she had set the suitcases down and he had climbed on top of them and looked at her with his too-large eyes and she had decided that he was coming too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whatever too meant. Wherever too was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her name was Lily and she was six years old and she was from a small town on the coast of Maine called Harwick, which had a gas station and a post office and a diner called Mabel’s where the fish chowder was very good and everyone knew everyone’s business whether they wanted them to or not. She had grown up in a white house on the edge of the Brennan farm, which grew blueberries in the summer and sat under snow all winter like something waiting patiently for the world to warm back up. Her mother had grown up in that house too. So had her grandmother, and her great-grandmother before that, and the house had a particular quality of accumulated living in it \u2014 in the floorboards, in the smell of the walls \u2014 that Lily had absorbed without knowing she was absorbing it, the way children absorb everything that matters most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her mother had been gone for seven months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not gone the way her grandmother meant when she said it \u2014 carefully, softly, with downcast eyes \u2014 but gone the way Lily meant when she said it to herself, which was honest and hard and without softening. She was not coming back. Lily understood this. Understanding it and being comfortable with it were not the same thing, but she was six, not stupid, and she had decided early on that pretending not to understand things was a waste of energy she needed for other purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The farm was being sold. Her grandmother had explained this the way she explained difficult things \u2014 sitting at the kitchen table, hands folded, voice steady \u2014 because her grandmother was not a woman who dressed hard facts in soft clothes. The farm had debts. Her mother had handled the money. Without her mother the debts had grown. There was a cousin in Portland, a man named Gerald who had a spare room and a wife named Diane who had said they were welcome. They would go on Friday. They could each take what they could carry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lily had looked around her room for a long time that evening. There was the purple lamp. There was the shelf of books. There was the box of drawings she’d made over three years, a hundred and seventeen of them, each one dated in her grandmother’s handwriting because Lily had asked her to keep track. There was the photograph on the nightstand \u2014 her mother laughing at something outside the frame, summer light, her hair loose \u2014 that she had been looking at every morning and every night for seven months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She could not take all of it. That was the true fact. So she had made the choices a six-year-old makes when she is forced to think like someone much older: she took the photograph, she took her drawing pencils, she took the dress her mother had picked out for her birthday, and she took the flowers from the garden \u2014 her mother’s garden, the one she had planted when Lily was two years old, the one she had tended every spring on her hands and knees with Lily beside her learning the names of things \u2014 because leaving the flowers felt like leaving the last part of her mother that was still alive and she was not ready to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was not sure she would ever be ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The puppy nosed at her cheek. She had not realized she’d started crying until she felt his warm breath on her face, the small specific comfort of being noticed by a creature who has no agenda except closeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She scratched his ear. He leaned into it with his whole body the way puppies do, completely and without reservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m going to call you Button,” she said. “Because of your nose.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked at her with his too-large eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You don’t have a say,” she said. “I’m carrying your suitcases.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He wagged his tail once \u2014 a slow, considering wag \u2014 and she felt the corners of her mouth do something despite everything. Not a full smile. But the beginning of one. The kind that reminds you the muscle still works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She stood up straight. She adjusted the basket on her back \u2014 felt the stems of the flowers through the weave, still intact, still there \u2014 and she picked up the suitcase and looked at the road that ran along the coast away from Harwick and toward Portland and toward the spare room and the man named Gerald and the wife named Diane and the enormous unknown shape of what came next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was six years old. She was carrying flowers and a suitcase and a photograph and her drawing pencils and a puppy who had decided without being asked that wherever she was going was where he was going too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was not nothing. It was not everything. But it was hers, and she had chosen it, and that was the difference between being lost and being on your way somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Okay, Button,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And she walked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"