The day before I returned to England, I drove seven miles along the

mountain range, then turned onto a narrow dirt road and stopped in
front of a powder-blue house. I parked behind an RV that was nearly as
large as the house itself. I knocked; my sister answered.

She stood in the doorway in flannel pajamas, a toddler on her hip
and two small girls clinging to her leg. Her son, about six, stood behind
her. Audrey stepped aside to let me pass, but her movements were stiff,
and she avoided looking directly at me. We’d spent little time together
since she’d married.

I moved into the house, stopping abruptly in the entryway when I
saw a three-foot hole in the linoleum that plunged to the basement. I
walked past the hole and into the kitchen, which was filled with the
scent of our mother’s oils—birch, eucalyptus, ravensara.

The conversation was slow, halting. Audrey asked me no questions
about England or Cambridge. She had no frame of reference for my
life, so we talked about hers—how the public school system was
corrupt so she was teaching her children herself, at home. Like me,
Audrey had never attended a public school. When she was seventeen,
she had made a fleeting effort to get her GED. She had even enlisted
the help of our cousin Missy, who had come up from Salt Lake City to
tutor her. Missy had worked with Audrey for an entire summer, at the
end of which she’d declared that Audrey’s education hovered
somewhere between the fourth- and fifth-grade levels, and that a GED
was out of the question. I chewed my lip and stared at her daughter,
who had brought me a drawing, wondering what education she could
hope to receive from a mother who had none herself.

We made breakfast for the children, then played with them in the
snow. We baked, we watched crime dramas and designed beaded