I barely slept that night.
Every time I closed my eyes, another piece of the summer returned.
The smell of my grandmother's rose bushes after rain.
The sound of a bicycle tire rattling over loose gravel.
The old screen door that slammed if you didn't hold it.
The little girl who always seemed to have paint on her fingers.
And the narrow creek behind Elmwood Street, where we built boats from pieces of discarded wood and argued about which one would survive the current.
I remembered Mara now.
Not perfectly.
Twenty-four years could blur a face, change a voice, and turn childhood memories into fragments that felt more like dreams than actual events.
But I remembered how she made me feel.
Before Mara, summer at Grandma Nora's house had been a place I went because my parents needed someone to watch me while they worked.
After I met her, summer became something I waited for all year.
I was twelve in 2002, old enough to believe I understood the world and young enough to be completely wrong about almost everything.
My parents lived in Chicago, where my father worked long shifts at an automotive manufacturing plant and my mother managed administrative records for a medical office.
They were good people, but they were rarely home at the same time.
The tension between them had become difficult to ignore.
Some evenings they spoke only about bills.
Other evenings, they argued quietly behind closed doors.
When summer vacation arrived, my mother usually drove me to Millbrook, Indiana, where her mother lived in a white house near the edge of town.
Grandma Nora was seventy-seven now, but in those days she seemed strong enough to last forever.
She had silver-brown hair that she wore in a neat bun, bright green eyes, and a stubborn belief that children should spend more time outdoors than inside.
She made peach cobbler.
Grew roses.
Kept a vegetable garden behind the shed.
And believed every broken object deserved at least one attempt at repair before being thrown away.
“Things aren't always finished just because they stop working,” she used to tell me.
I grew up hearing that sentence.
Eventually, I began repeating it in the garage.
But the memory that mattered most had nothing to do with tools.
It began on a hot afternoon in June, when Grandma sent me down Elmwood Street to purchase a loaf of bread.
I was carrying a few dollar bills in my pocket and thinking about the baseball game on television when I noticed a little girl sitting beneath the oak tree beside the neighboring house.
She had long brown hair, a scraped knee, and an old wooden picture frame resting in her lap.
She was painting it bright blue.
I stopped.
“What's that?”
She looked up.
“A picture frame.”
I frowned.
“I can see that.”
“Then why'd you ask?”
I stared at her.
She returned to painting.
I should have kept walking.
Instead, I stepped closer.
“Why blue?”
She shrugged.
“Because blue makes things look happy.”
I looked at the frame.
“That doesn't make sense.”
She raised her eyes.
“Neither does your haircut.”
I stared.
Then laughed.
She tried not to smile.
Failed.
And that was how I met Mara Quinn.
She lived next door with her father, Elliot, her mother, Rebecca, and her younger sister, Anna, who was five and believed every butterfly was a secret message from a fairy.
Mara was eleven, only a few months from turning twelve.
She loved painting.
Hated peas.
Could climb trees better than I could.