Half the time I don’t know whether to admire my mother or to be furious with her. I suppose I should admire her for being brave enough to stand up to Nana and Papa — for going ahead and marrying Dad when her parents didn’t approve of him. Dad, a painter from a middle-class family in the south, with no social credentials to speak of. But he did go to Yale (on a scholarship), and Mom knew Nana would have trouble disapproving of a Mount Holyoke—Yale marriage. The important thing, Mom has told me, is that she knew she and Dad were soul mates. Nothing was going to stop her from spending the rest of her life with him. So they got married and settled in Millerton, and Nana and Papa decided they could tolerate Dad. When Dad couldn’t quite make a living with his paintings, he and Mom bought the big house on Grant Avenue and turned it into a boardinghouse. Nana’s pursed lips whenever she rides down Grant say exactly what she thinks of our house. But Mom ignores Nana. Except for when she gives in to her. Which is about 50 percent of the time.

When Nana leaves after lunch, Mom watches her walk away, says “Huh,” under her breath, then pulls a faded kerchief out of her pocket and puts it back on her head so she can help Toby finish the dusting.

I sit on the front porch by myself for a few minutes. I decide to put the cotillion and the death of Papa out of my mind. I spend the rest of the afternoon doing the following: 1. Helping Cookie in the kitchen, for which I am rewarded with a piece of raspberry pie. 2. Helping Mom and Toby with the rest of the cleaning. 3. Lying on my bed and reading from my current stack of library books. 4. Taking Miss Hagerty’s afternoon tea tray to her, and explaining why I won’t need a new drop-waist organdy dress. 5. Painting with Dad in his studio.

When Dad announces that it is six o’clock and time for dinner, I am honestly surprised. This is why I love summer and don’t want to be anywhere but here. All year long I look forward to these days that stretch out endlessly ahead of me, filled with walks and books and painting and Miss Hagerty. And free of class presentations and gym and dances and snippy, gossipy girls. Best of all, when each day ends, the evening still yawns ahead.

We eat dinner together — Mom and Dad, Miss Hagerty, Mr. Penny, Angel Valentine, and I. As soon as the table has been cleared, I glance expectantly at Miss Hagerty.

“Lemonade?” she says.

“Cookie and I made it this afternoon,” I reply.

Miss Hagerty looks like she wants to clap her hands and jump up and down. Instead, she says, “I’ll wait for you on the porch.”

“Lemonade time, is it?” says Mr. Penny. He almost smiles.

And Angel Valentine, who has changed out of her work clothes and is gliding through our dining room in her bare feet, looks at me with interest. “There’s lemonade?” she says.

Angel is so wonderful that sometimes I forget she has only lived with us for a month. She doesn’t know all our routines.

“In the summer,” I tell her, “starting with my first day of vacation, we have lemonade on the porch every night after supper.”

The truth is that only Miss Hagerty and I have lemonade on the porch every night. Mom and Dad rarely join us, and Mr. Penny joins us if he feels like it. I wonder if Angel Valentine will want to be a part of these summer evenings.

I open the refrigerator, take out the pitcher of lemonade that Cookie and I made, and set it on a tray with glasses. I carry it carefully to the porch. I am serving Miss Hagerty and Mr. Penny and Angel when I hear Dad say, “Hattie?”

I turn around. Dad is standing at the door, looking at me through the screen. “Can you come inside for a moment?”

I start to say that we are about to have our lemonade, but I am stopped by the tone of Dad’s voice. What he has said is not really a question, but an order.

“Okay.” I set down my empty glass.

Dad motions me to the parlor, where I see Mom seated on the couch. She is sitting up very, very straight and tall, and looks uncertain, like she is about to have her school picture taken. I am still standing in the doorway when she says, “Hattie, your father and I need to talk to you about something.”

I collapse onto a chair. I decide that they are going to make me go to the cotillion.

“This is very serious,” Mom adds, and instead I decide that I am about to find out what will be the death of Papa.

“It’s Papa, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Papa?” Mom repeats. “No, it’s …” She looks to Dad for help. Dad looks back at her and shrugs his shoulders, a tiny little shrug.

“Hattie, I suppose we should have told you this a long time ago,” Mom says.

What? What should they have told me?

Mom has spread her hands in her lap and is touching the knuckles of her left hand with the index finger of her right. She sighs. “Your uncle Hayden and I have another brother,” she says at last. “Adam. Your uncle Adam.”

“I have another uncle?” I reply. This is especially interesting, since Dad is an only child, and Hayden has never married, so I thought he was my only relative, apart from my grandparents. I have always envied Betsy, who has a total of fourteen aunts and uncles and nearly thirty cousins.

“Yes,” Mom replies, still poking at her knuckles, still not looking at me. “Adam is the baby of the family. He was born when I was sixteen, and Uncle Hayden was eighteen.”

I do some figuring in my head, and I frown. “Then Uncle Adam is only twenty-one or twenty-two,” I say.

“Twenty-one,” Mom murmurs.

“Where does he live? Why haven’t I ever met him?”

Mom just twists her hands around, so Dad says, “Adam has been away at school. In Ohio. Since he was twelve.”

“Twelve?” I am shocked. Who goes away to school when he is twelve and doesn’t come back? I do a little more figuring and realize that I was one or two when Adam left. So I probably did meet him, but I would have been too little to remember. “Doesn’t he come home for vacations?” I ask.

“Hattie,” says Dad, “Adam … has some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“He’s not like other people,” says Mom.

“What do you mean?”

Another look passes between Mom and Dad. “He has … mental problems.” Dad says the last two words in a loud whisper.

“He’s been living at a special school.” Mom also whispers.

“Then is he retarded?” I ask. This is the way it always is with my family. Twenty questions. I wish my parents could tell me things straight out.

“No, he’s not retarded, exactly,” Mom answers. “It’s that he’s not quite … right. He has some trouble controlling himself. He’s unpredictable, erratic.”

“Nana and Papa took him to lots of doctors when he was young,” adds Dad. “Some of them thought he was schizophrenic or autistic.”

Schizophrenic. Autistic. I don’t know these words.

“But why doesn’t he come home on school vacations?” I want to know.

“Adam’s school isn’t like yours, Hattie,” says Dad. “He lives there. His teachers know how to manage him.”

“But,” Mom continues, “his school is about to close. For good. And Adam is coming home to live with Nana and Papa this summer while they look for another school for him. Papa is leaving for Ohio tomorrow. He’ll bring Adam back here on Friday.”

About eight questions spring to mind. I choose one. It seems to me to be more important than my questions about Adam’s illness. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about Adam? I mean, before now.” I am certain I have never heard his name.

Mom, twisting, twisting. Dad, looking like he wishes his hands cupped a glass of Jack Daniel’s.

“I guess we just didn’t think it was necessary,” says Mom.

“We didn’t want to worry you,” says Dad.

Worry me about what?

They are leaping around the subject as if it were a fire and they were barefoot.

Don’t they know how hard it is to be their daughter, to stand by and watch?

Well. I will have to figure things out for myself. I suppose I will meet Adam very soon.

That night I turn out my light at ten o’clock. I lie in bed forever, staring out the window. Sleep will not come.

I am thinking about my new uncle. Adam. I try to picture him.

I hear Mr. Penny’s clocks strike eleven, then twelve.

I am still wide-awake.

Finally, I tiptoe downstairs and into the dark parlor. I turn on a lamp, cross the room to the shelf where we keep our photo albums. I flip through my favorites — the ones with pictures of me when I was little.

But tonight I need different albums, older ones. They haven’t interested me before, and so I haven’t bothered much with them. Now I open one that is losing its black binding. In it I see Nana and Papa on their wedding day, then Mom and Uncle Hayden as babies. This one is too old. I put it back and locate one in which I find Mom posing for the camera in a cap and gown. Her high school graduation. That’s better. I turn a few pages, and there is a photo of Mom and Uncle Hayden, side by side, a small boy standing between them. He is about four years old, and wears perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses. He is leaning forward slightly and giving the camera an enormous grin.

He doesn’t look like he has problems.

I pull the photo out of its plastic case and turn it over. In Mom’s handwriting I see: Me, Adam, Hayden — 1942.

In the next few pages of photos, Adam grows up quickly. And becomes more and more solemn. I see Adam at five, the round glasses blurring his eyes, standing by a fancy car with Nana and Papa. A year later, a family portrait. Adam is the only one not smiling. He’s not looking at the camera either. Mom, standing behind him, is resting a hand on his shoulder. She looks stiff.

What was Adam like when he was a baby? I wonder. What was he like when he was four, six, ten?

And then I wonder for the nine thousandth time that evening why I was never told about Adam. If he didn’t have to come home now, would I ever have been told about him?

If a person is kept secret, is he real?

I imagine Nana and Papa and their immaculate home. I try to picture Adam in it. Maybe Nana and Papa think he doesn’t fit there. Certainly, he is not part of the perfect world Nana has worked so hard to create.

I’m not perfect either, but luckily I don’t live with Nana and Papa.

And then it occurs to me that Mom did. She grew up in that house.

Now that is really something to think about.