I’ll tell you the worst one, since I’m already this far in. We took family pictures that fall, all dressed up nice at one of those studios in the mall. When the gal was lining us up behind the camera, I sort of eased Lily off to the side.

Said the light looked better with just the three of us in tight. Ray didn’t even notice. So it was Cody, me, and Ray all grinning, and Lily standing back by the wall holding onto her own elbows. We hung that picture up in the hallway. Three of us. I walked past it every single day for months, and not once did I stop and think, now where is Lily.

That brings me to the drawing. It was a school assignment, draw your family, colored pencils, the kind of thing every kid does. Her teacher, Mrs. Hartman, called the house and said in this real careful voice, “We’d like to talk to you about something Lily made.” Ray was at work, so I drove up to the school by myself. The teacher slid a piece of paper across her desk, and I looked at it, and I had to read it three times before it landed.

There were four people in it. Ray, me, and Cody, all holding hands under a big yellow sun. And then off to one side she’d drawn a fence. A little wooden fence. And behind that fence, drawn real small, was a girl with dark hair, just watching. She’d put herself behind a fence, on the outside, looking in at the rest of us.

At the bottom, in that big wobbly little-kid printing, she’d written, “My family. I stand behind the fence because that’s where I watch from when Karen takes the family photos.”

Mrs. Hartman didn’t say a thing. She just looked at me. And I sat in that little plastic chair feeling like the whole room had gone tilted sideways.

Because the child wasn’t even being spiteful about it. She wasn’t tattling on me. She had just drawn the plain truth, the way she saw it, the way I had made it for her. I don’t even remember the drive home. I’ve kept that drawing folded up in my Bible to this very day.

That night I couldn’t so much as look at Ray across the supper table. I went up to put the kids to bed, and I stood in the bathroom doorway while Lily brushed her teeth. She saw me in the mirror. She didn’t turn around. She just watched me in the glass, brushing slow, and then she spit and rinsed and stood there gripping the edge of that sink with both hands.

“Karen,” she said. “Do you want me to go live somewhere else?”

I couldn’t get a word out.

“I can ask Dad,” she said. “I don’t want to make your family hard.” She said it as plain as if she was asking what was for breakfast.