Mimi knew where to look for her mom when school let out. Sometimes Mimi told people the reading room had been named after her, even though she knew it wasn’t true. It made for a good story. It made the other girls’ mouths drop open, even the ones who were rich and lived in big houses and weren’t so sure about Mimi. A couple of the girls whispered that she didn’t have a father. Maybe she didn’t care what they thought about her or whether or not they believed her when she said the reading room belonged to her family. She had become a fanatical reader, so she felt a special connection to the library anyway, and Story was her name too, so the reading room did belong to her in that way. She liked to think that if her aunt was still alive they would talk about books. Her mother didn’t have time to read, although she told the best stories. She’d said that when she was young she had invented an entire world with its own language, although she didn’t remember any of it now.
“You should have written it down,” Mimi told her. “When you write things down, they’re harder to forget.”
Mimi had been writing down the stories her mother told her about her father. They weren’t true stories; they were better than that. She had a diary full of them in a collection she’d titled The Most Loyal Dog in the World, which was all about her father’s adventures with his dog named Mother. Mimi thought it was a hilarious name. She had glued a photograph of her father inside the cover. He was smiling. There weren’t that many of him like that, when he looked as if he’d take all the time in the world to tell you a story and walk in the woods with you and clomp through the snow in Central Park, which were all things her mother said he loved to do. Mimi liked to study his face. She felt she knew him even though she didn’t. It was his grave they visited in Queens, but he was here, too, in her book.
She had been writing to her aunt in Paris. She liked having a pen pal who was so far away. Every time there was a letter for her in the mailbox, it was as if a secret message had been waiting there all day while she’d been in school. She had started out sending her artwork, then had begun to add messages on the back. After a while, she began to get letters back. Her aunt was funny. She sent jokes: Why did the tomato go out with a prune? Because he couldn’t get a date! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! She drew little sketches of Paris—a streetlight, the pet crow that lived in the workshop where she made jewelry, a bridge over the river with a curlicue railing, a rosebush in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
“What was the name for aunt in your language?” Mimi asked her mother one day as they were headed home from school. They usually took the long way around, but on warm days they went along the bay. Her mother seemed to like to walk there. She would stop in certain places and gaze into the woods and then they would keep going again.
“I don’t remember any of the words,” her mother said.
Mimi’s mother was beautiful and sad. She wasn’t friends with any of the other mothers at school. Whenever there was a potluck dinner, Mimi’s grandfather Gogi would make a dish for them to bring and he’d go with her because her mother was too nervous about school gatherings. Sometimes their cousin Mary would come over and the two women would sit on the couch and drink wine and laugh and then Elv didn’t even sound like Mimi’s mother. She sounded like someone who was happy.
“You must remember something,” Mimi insisted.
Mimi was the best student in her third-grade class not only because she was a fanatical reader but because she was persistent.
Her mother thought it over. If sister was gig, then aunt was most likely gigi. That’s what she had called Claire when it was just the two of them and the rest of the world had been so far away.
Dear Gigi, Mimi wrote from then on. Mimi’s bedroom overlooked the garden, where her mother often worked on warm days. The garden wasn’t very sunny, so they’d had to cut down some little willow trees where Miss Featherstone had liked to perch and peer out at the world. Mimi still had Miss Featherstone, the doll who had accompanied her everywhere when she was younger. But now that Mimi was in third grade and would be turning eight in July, Miss Featherstone was left at home most times. She was still a good listener when it came to the stories Mimi told at night before she fell asleep. Her mother’s stories always began Once upon a time, even though that meant everything in them had already happened and everyone in them was already gone.
Every year her aunt in Paris sent something special on her birthday. It had begun when she was three, the year Mimi sent the first picture. Her aunt had mailed the birthday gifts to Mimi’s grandpa, but now his address was their address, too. The presents came in pink boxes, Mimi’s favorite color, and were tied with black silk ribbon. She couldn’t have been more excited over the charms her aunt made especially for her. Her mother thought they were beautiful, too. She handled them tenderly when Mimi showed her, then gave them back.
The charms were Mimi’s favorite things in the world, except for books and Miss Featherstone and her grandparents and her mother and the photograph of her father. She kept them in their pink boxes in her top dresser drawer. Each one had arrived with a message. So you’re always fast. A gold horse with a moonstone saddle. So you can fly. A tiny gold and turquoise robin with a silver beak. So you never get lost. A firefly with citrine eyes and an orange opal at its center that glowed like a beacon. That one had looked so real Mimi had taken it to school to show off when the term began. She said it was a real firefly from Paris, and that in France all the insects were made out of gold. Everyone believed her and wanted to touch it for good luck. Then she almost lost the charm when Patti Weinstein dropped it. She quickly wrapped the firefly in a tissue and stuck it in her backpack, and she never brought the charms to school again.