The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro

simple as that. People have asked me about it for years, though, because if you look closely, it looks like the cow is kind of smiling.”
    â€œA bovine Mona Lisa,” said my father.
    â€œYes! I got so lucky with that cow.”
    â€œMom,” said Lee.
    â€œMom? I got a ‘Mom’? I can’t remember the last time you called me Mom. It’s always Linda with you.”
    â€œCan we talk about something other than you getting lucky with a cow?”
    â€œOh, my dear, sometimes I regret that I never went in for all that Emily Post stuff. I think I did us both a disservice.”
    â€œI know what you mean,” said my mother. “I wasn’t very good about making my kids write thank-you notes and it haunts us to this day.” A lie. I’d never witnessed my mother lie like that, and it threw me. Not just because she was lying (she was on me about thank-you notes as soon as I could properly hold a pen), but because the lie effectively did so much work, expressing sympathy for Linda but ultimately defending Lee, and at my expense. I couldn’t immediately name the feeling that crept up on me, but on reflection, it seemed a lot like jealousy. I wanted my mother’s affection for myself.
    â€œLee is her father’s daughter,” said Linda. “She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do.” Ostensibly celebrating something irrepressible in Lee, Linda’s comment had an ugly undertone that seemed aimed at the table, a warning to all of us when it came to taking sides.
    â€œYes,” said Lee, “and right now I’m gonna get that waiter back here and order another bottle of wine.”
    U NDER A CANOPY of trees the dirt lane from Flintwick’s compound led to a paved, sleepy road. We passed a barn and yellow and green fields that soon dipped down into a darker, cooler valley, shaded from the disappearing sun by the tall, dense pines of the Catskill preserve. Brown signs etched with yellow paint marked turnoffs for a campground, a waterfall, the trail head for a hike, untilthe forest cover thinned out again and we came to the two-lane route we’d taken in. Instead of turning right, which would take us back the way we came, Lee went left along the winding mountain road. Some scenic detour, I figured, to keep things going before we headed back to the city. She’d promised me a road trip, and I didn’t want to go home yet.
    In the passenger seat, I leafed through a scrapbook Lee had been given by her aunt Delia, whom she’d gone to see in North Carolina a few months earlier on a fact-finding mission. Press clippings from a local paper and a copy of a page from his 1965 high-school yearbook picturing Jesse perched on a stool with his guitar, clean-cut in permanent-press pants and a crisp-collared, button-down shirt under a sport coat, his hair still short enough to be corralled into a stiff side sweep off his forehead. The caption beneath the photo: Jesse Parrish never fails to entertain!
    â€œDelia told me that in his first band at boarding school, they played a dance at the girls’ academy nearby. His guitar went missing afterward and the headmistress found it a week later in one of the girl’s beds. He drove her to theft.”
    â€œBut he stole her heart.”
    â€œIt’s possible Delia made that story up. She’s sort of lucid and sort of bonkers. But I don’t know. Have you read the letter yet?”
    Tucked in there was an envelope postmarked Los Angeles, May 27, 1970, containing this:
    Dear Sis,
    I hope this finds you as well as can be. I won’t go on with a thousand apologies for being out of touch, because you know how it goes. You’re as bad as I am. But I wanted to let you know that Linda and Igot married. No society page announcements. A few of us on a beach down in Mexico. Tumbling surf and a light breeze and all that. Do you know it was the first time I’ve ever seen Linda nervous? Not that she