NAP 2.6

STRIATION Knitting. This is what the nurse suggested Lauren teach her mother to keep her hands moving, to keep her brain occupied.

How anyone could shake Lauren’s calloused cyclist’s paw and make this suggestion, she did not know, but she went to the hobby store, walked through displays of potpourri and paint stencils until she found herself in an ocean-themed aisle filled with starfish stickers, stuffed sharks, ways to make entire aquatic papier-mâché worlds. While Lauren and her father spent their summers mapping new bike trails into the Colorado Rockies, her mother had stayed with her sisters at a beach house in Connecticut, the last remnant of faded family wealth. She would return tan and smiling, and for as long as this lasted, Lauren would find small trails of sand in the hallway and in the dining room and on the staircase.

There were bags of sand in the ocean-themed aisle, sand dyed cheerful colors. Lauren bought one bag of each color, a plastic funnel, and little glass jars with tiny cork stoppers.

She created an assembly line at a table near the window where a stationary bike once stood, carted away after her father’s death along with the displays of Lauren’s medals and time sheets. After dinner each evening, Lauren watched her mother layer the purple, green, red, blue, yellow, until the bottles could hold no more.