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...I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, "Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?"

"In a heartbeat," he said, "and you know it."

"I wouldn't take any of it back," Mom said, and maybe I don't know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can't figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can't really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place.

Here is Katie, my protagonist, looking down on her mother's garden from a window up above. With her mother, lost to cancer, gone for nearly three seasons now, Katie continues to calculate the rubrics of survival. Nothing but Ghosts has at last come into its own as a tangible hardcover.

... all I have before me now is sky and gravel, and, to the left, below, my mother’s garden. The yellow, white, and red of the big fat dahlia. The effusive zinnias. The catmint and the mounds of hellebores that survived the winter and bloomed in spring and sit there making their plans for next season. Everything that could have bloomed without Mom’s help has, miraculously, bloomed, even things that aren’t supposed to survive the frost. Even the weeds that have wedged into the empty spaces can’t contradict my mother’s beauty, or her idea of beauty, or the need for beauty to live on. “I’m not going far,” she said.

Throwing the window latch, I push my weight against the glass, and though it takes an extra urging, it finally gives. Fitting my fingers inside the contraptions of the screen window, I free that, too. Nothing separates me now from the world outside, and I lean out as far as I can into summer—look forward, look down, upon Mom’s garden. I stand here making promises to myself—a daughter’s promises, a girl’s: To live my life with my eyes wide open. To honor exuberance, and color.