The Beginning of After

her friends. I stood in the doorway of the guest room, watching her unpack clothes into the old garage-sale dresser my mom and I had once covered with painted flowers.
    Mom had said to me, “Honey, look, your roses have dimension!” and I wasn’t even sure how I’d done it. It was one of the first times we both realized that maybe I had some talent in this area. Over the course of a few months, we found and decorated a dozen more pieces of furniture: a rocking chair with vines traveling up the spokes, a toy chest with wooden alphabet blocks.
    When we ran out of room for new pieces in the house, Mom wanted us to paint a mural down the hallway wall, but my father nixed the idea, saying, “It’ll look like graffiti, and the neighbors will freak when they come over.”
    Now I watched Nana hold up a silk paisley scarf and gaze at it affectionately before laying it into one of the rose-covered drawers. She looked up and startled when she saw me.
    “Oh! I didn’t see you there.”
    “Masher can come home.”
    She looked at me like, Oh, joy .
    “I’m going to go get him.”
    “Do you want me to take you?”
    “Thanks, but . . . no. I can do it myself. I have to get used to driving back and forth to work, right?”
    “Start with little things,” Suzie had said during our second session the day before. “Just jump into them and see how it feels to you.” I was going to be seeing her twice a week for a while.
    So I turned and walked downstairs, jingling the car keys to show that yeah, I was really going to do this.
    The Volvo’s driver’s seat always used to smell like my mom, a strange combination of berries and coffee. Now that was gone and Nana’s essence of perfume-lipstick- hairspray had taken over. I rested my hands on the steering wheel and it felt okay. I glanced over to my dad’s car, the green, sporty Volkswagen he’d been so excited to get because it reminded him of the Rabbit he’d had in high school.
    Hi, Dad’s car , I thought. I’d take you for a spin, but he never taught me to drive stick.
    Five minutes later I was steering the Volvo to the animal hospital, going slowly at first and then eventually hitting the speed limit.
    I wasn’t scared or nervous, and that surprised me a little.
    By the time I was heading back home, with Masher in the passenger seat next to me, driving felt downright good. He was hanging his head out the window, letting his tongue flap in the breeze with that “Is he really smiling?” dog look on his face, and I thought, Here’s a moment when everything’s okay .
    Masher didn’t have the same zip when I let him out of the car, but he went gladly into the house, with commitment. It was that commitment that pulled at my heart and reminded me that regardless of who he belonged to or what other things I did or did not feel capable of doing, I was his guardian now.
    Inside, Nana was vacuuming the living room.
    “Are we expecting someone?” I kidded.
    Nana turned off the vacuum cleaner and regarded Masher.
    “He looks good,” she said, then after a pause: “David’s coming to see him. He’ll be here in an hour.”
    She pulled her glance quickly from me and turned the vacuum back on.
    Heat flushed through my body, starting with my face and speeding downward. Making me feel suddenly ill.
    “Why . . . did you do that?”
    Nana kept her eyes on the carpet although I knew she heard me, which was so unlike her. It was clear how guilty she must have felt about it.
    “I know you’re mad at him,” she called over the sound of the vacuum. She said it so casually, it set something off in me.
    “Aren’t you mad at him too?”
    Now Nana turned off the vacuum and looked at me, unsurprised by my question. “I’m a little mad. He shouldn’t have said whatever he said to make you so upset. But we should try not to judge people based on one instance.”
    “I don’t think I can do that, with him.”
    “It is difficult. But I’ve been around a lot longer, and I’ve learned things the tough way.” She looked wistful, her face full of stories I had yet to hear.
    Instead of asking her to elaborate, I blurted out, “Aren’t you mad at Mr. Kaufman, at least?”
    Nana pursed her lips reflectively for a second, like it had never occurred to her that I would be thinking about these things. She took a deep breath and held it, which I knew was her way of preparing something important to say.
    “Yes. I break my own rule on that.” She paused. “But if I can’t