looked at it a moment longer, and something crossed his face. “But sweetheart. Where’s the drawing?”
Lisa went completely still. “Dad Brandon, no,” she said. “Don’t.”
Because he’d already lifted a folded sheet of construction paper out from underneath where the frame had been. Her words made his hand freeze in midair.
“What is it, Lisa?” he asked gently.
She stared at the folded paper in his hand, and her eyes flooded with tears, and her whole body seemed to shrink.
“Gran—” she started, then stopped and corrected herself, and the correction was the worst part. “Barbara. She told me to throw it away. She said it was wrong and I had to throw it in the trash.”
Brandon went very still. “You showed this to her already? When?”
“This morning.” Lisa’s voice was barely a whisper. “I showed her because I was proud of
it. And she got mad.”
Brandon looked up at his mother. Just for a second. Then he unfolded the paper.
It was a child’s drawing. Four stick figures standing in a crooked, hand-holding row, the way kids draw families. Underneath each one, Lisa had written a label in careful purple marker.
MOM. DAD. ME. GRANDMA.
Except the word GRANDMA had been crossed out. Hard. Two heavy, angry lines slashed through it in blue ballpoint pen, the pen pressed down so firmly it had almost torn the paper. And beside
the crossed-out word, in a cramped adult hand, someone had written a single word.
NO.
