“So why would she take so much trouble to break our mirror in secret and then hide part of it?’
Justin smiles at me. “What?! I know something you don’t know?”
“All right,” I tell him.
“I figured something out that you didn’t figure out, Dad?”
“All right, calm down,” I say. “Everybody gets one.”
“This is a once in a century thing,” Justin says. “I’ll do Joy’s little victory dance.”
Justin begins to dance the way Joy does when she wins something and she’s happy. Suzy laughs. I almost laugh.
“Come on, now,” I tell him.
“Well,” Justin lifts the mattress again and takes the mirror-shard. “You asked and answered your own question, Dad. It’s a mirror,” he shows me my own reflection. “There are no mirrors anywhere in my dream except in your house and maybe the water, if you can call it a mirror. My little girl’s growing up, and even though she isn’t surrounded by other children, she’s starting to care about what she looks like. She wants to know what she looks like.”
“She’s becoming a teenager,” Suzy says.
“She’s not a teenager yet,” I say, feeling as if someone’s going to take my favorite granddaughter away from me.
“It’s a process,” Suzy reminds me. “It starts early. Remember Angela?”
Justin puts the mirror back exactly as it was and makes sure the mattress doesn’t look distrubed. “You’re going to keep this secret,” he tells us. “You’re not going to show her that you know where it is. This is her secret, right?”
I nod. Suzy nods.
He exhales with sadness. “All these years, I hardly ever thought about Joy being a teenager. Everything here is so surreal, everything is part of a dream adventure, that I only rarely thought about Joy growing up. But she’s growing up.”
Suzy nods as we follow Justin out of the cabin. “She’s growing up,” she says.
As much as I don’t want to hear it, the facts are the facts. “She’s growing up,” I say.
—Told by Grampa Walt